I am wondering if anyone of my wonderful VA buddies that are experts at web desgign and seo know if split testing sales pages is bad for seo? Duplicate content is bad for seo and sales pages are duplicate content. Is there a method to do split testing without it effecting seo?

help me please!!

Hamid? Tess? Where are you???? I need your expertise.....

OOPs sorry when I said sales pages were duplicate content I meant to say that if you do split testing that it would be duplicate content.

Serena, I've wondered this myself. For WP sites, I found this information awhile back: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/data-dri...wordpress-blog I think part of the key here is to use canonical links to avoid the duplicate content issue.

And related to the above link is this: http://www.dellanave.com/blog/2009/0...heme-w-plugin/

Not sure I helped...but had to give 'er a try.

For non-WP sites, to me, it is harder to do and not get in trouble with Google by using cloaking or redirects, etc. Using a system (A/B splitting) whereas site A with changes is up for a while, and then replace with site B, may be an option, or even internal program logic, but I need to learn way more about this to make an informed decision.

Interesting topic - glad you brought it up!

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Jules, SunRise Virtual Solutions - WordPress Customization & XHTML/CSS Web Sites

Thanks for your info!! I will read the links. The client I need it for sales pages are on wordpress. I am starting to think that we need to do it in html instead.

Hi VBSOnDemand,

This would depend on how your client has their website structured, but just testing different landing pages or sales pages will not count as duplicate content and thus get you penalized.

For example if you have this scenario.

http://mysite.com - home page
http://mysite.com/salespage1.html
http://mysite.com/salespage2.html

There is no duplicate content issues unless your sales pages will be entirely exactly the same word for word.

You can use wordpress for this as well just create separate pages and of course give the pages different names.

If your worried about google penalizing you I think it's possible to create a Google XML sitemap and exclude the 2 sales pages you are trying to test. In this fashion when Google crawls your clients site they won't crawl the 2 sales pages because they will be excluded from your sitemap, this no penalty. You would basically be making those pages private from the search engines.

I hope maybe this helps you out a bit!