How does Google index our site when you're doing a Website Optimizer experiment?

Question

I'm about to use Google's Website Optimizer to do a/b testing on the home page of my site. My question is: which of the alternative pages will google's spider index? All of them? I couldn't find any info about this on google or on GWO pages.

Answer 1

6S Marketing wrote a good blog post in response to this question.

To summarize, yes you can have duplicate content issues with an A/B test (MVT is ok), but there are steps you can take to avoid this, such as:

• use noindex in your header for page B
• use the canonical tag for page B to point to page A
• exclude page B in your “robots.txt”
• make sure that page A is in your sitemap, and that the other pages are not
• do not link to page B from anywhere unless absolutely necessary (I don't know why it would be tho)

After the test is over you could setup a 301 from page B to page A as well (this is also important when a user bookmarks your page B, or linked to it)

the same goes for any other alternate pages you have like C, D, E, etc..