Two Impacts of A/B Testing On Your SEO Efforts

...two major concerns:

• Content Cloaking: the act of showing different content to search engine bots and actual human visitors. A/B testing software (such as Visual Website Optimizer) swap content on the page using JavaScript, so some users see different content (of variations) and bots see original page only.
• Duplicate Content: the act of copying content from elsewhere and hosting it on your site. Search engines penalize for such stealing of content because you cannot expect to rank on keywords for the content that isn’t yours. Again, many A/B and multivariate testing software (including VWO) have an option where you can redirect site traffic to different variations of a page which raises this concern.

via visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

Properly done A/B and multivariate testing do not ruin your SEO investments. I have done numerous tests like that and analytics from search engines never pissed me off afterwards. (Triple knock on the wood though. Never say never. :)

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Email subject A/B test

Email Subject Line Test: Which Otherwise Identical Message Got More Clicks (Not Opens) – Dash vs. Colon?

VERSION A	VS.	VERSION B

via whichtestwon.com

Very nice experiment.

My gut told me version A is a better winner, as dash works as "call for action". And I was sorta right.

Version A made it by almost 15% over the version B in clicks, however, version B received more open by more than 12%. I don't have a good explanation for that, but that's an interesting thing to come by.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost