A/B Testing and SEO Split Testing
A controlled experiment comparing two versions of a page or a page element, judged by statistical significance rather than by impression.
Analogy Mental model
A double-blind clinical trial. A patient saying they feel better proves nothing; only the difference between the treated group and the placebo group does.
In practice What you actually do
Separate two different exercises. Conversion testing shows half the visitors one variant of the same URL and compares outcomes. SEO split testing takes a large set of structurally identical pages, changes the template on a random subset, leaves a control group untouched, and compares organic clicks after several weeks.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Never serve different content to crawlers and users on the same URL, which constitutes cloaking and can also leave a crawler with an incoherent picture of the page. Group by URL instead.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →