Hello all, I am new here and I got a question regarding an A/B testing I would like to do to my home page and whether the test will affect the current SEO ranking of my site. I would like to test the position of 2 ads on my homepage, we will call them AD 1 and AD 2. I will be creating a duplicate of my homepage for this test. a) In homepage 1, I will place AD 1 to the left of AD 2. b) In homepage 2, I will place AD 2 to the left of AD 1. Both homepage will have the same content and ad but the ads will in different position of each other. I will be using the Javascript below to rotate the display of the 2 homepage so that 50% of the time, homepage 1 will get display and the other 50% of the time homepage 2 will get display. <script type="text/javascript"> var random_number = Math.random(); if (random_number < 0.5){ window.document.location.href ( 'index2.html' ); } else { window.document.location.href ( 'index3.html' ); } </script> Does anyone know by doing the following the search engines will penalize me for it: 1. having 2 pages with duplicate content 2. using the above javascript to load homepage 1 or 2 Is there a better way or script of handing this A/B test? Thanks in advance for any help. Cheers, Nathan.
I think your concern about search engines issues are valid. My worry is that this might look like cloaking to search engines. I would show the same page in both cases, just put your randomizing code on that same page to show the different arrangements of ads.