A/B Split Testing - Rankings Drop? Need an expert opinion...
-
We are running an A/B split test (Started on 12/12), and a few days after we started the test, we fell from position 9/10 (about 3 weeks on page 1) to position 11/13, and we've been there ever since.
We are still running the test. We disallowed the test page in robots.txt, but that's all.
- no canonical
- no noindex
-no Google Experiments code.
Theoretically, Google could crawl the site, and find the page, but then the page is disallowed. The alternate page is not indexed.
Could this explain the rankings drop?
-
It's a big site, and the most important category page. It explains a lot.
-
How big is your site? Is the page being A/B tested a pretty strong page (PA, PR)?
Let's say you've got a relatively small site, with a few dozen pages, and the page in question is one of only a couple linked to from the main nav. So it's one of the stronger pages on the site. Blocking it in robots.txt means Google isn't going to continue to distribute link juice from that page to other pages on your site, so all of those other pages get slightly weaker.
In general, robots.txt isn't the place to block Google, as you throw away the outbound link juice from that page that's blocked. Instead, you'd want to do a meta robots noindex,follow on the page itself.
If you've got a big site, and this particular landing page isn't a major portion of the overall site in terms of PA, then you shouldn't have seen an effect like I've described.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unexplainable drop in traffic
Hello Mozzers, I am new at Moz and certainly hope you can help me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | svsanchez75
I used to consider myself very knowledgeable in SEO since I had hundreds or maybe thousands of keywords very well ranked on Google Guatemala (www.google.com.gt) for more than a decade. That was until a year ago: November 8th, 2019... On that date, all of my rankings plummeted, never to return. At first I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried, so I started doing a bunch of things: Reworked the pages (except home page) to make them responsive (I used to have two versions of each page, one for desktop and one for mobile). Removed the ads from the pages to make them faster, thinking it could be due to the speed (even if my competitors sites were slower!) Fixed thousands of 404s Disavowed thousands of bad domains and spammy URLs (I never bought a single link but there were thousands of links from forums, theglobe network, etc) Removed more than 12,000 members from my own forum who had never posted anything: about 4000 of them just had created a profile to include a link to different extenral sites. Fixed a few other technical aspects... Nothing helped. In fact, my rankings have kept going down. My content is good and unique, my site has good DA but still I get outranked and buried by several sites which don't have as much information as I have. There are NO manual actions against my site according to Search Console. As I mentioned before, I have never bought any backlinks, so all of my links should be natural (although there were thousands of links to my forum from spammy sites which I disavowed). So, I am frustrated as I really don't know what the problem is. I am giving you 3 examples of Keywords and URLs of pages that were number one for years, and now are not even on first page, so that you can see them and tell me your thoughts about what may be happening: KEYWORD: VOLCANES DE GUATEMALA
URL: https://www.deguate.com/geografia/volcanes/Los-volcanes-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 5th page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help. KEYWORD: MINISTERIOS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/politica_ministerios/Los-ministerios-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 2nd page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help. KEYWORD: LEYENDAS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/misterios-leyendas/las-leyendas-mas-famosas-en-guatemala.shtml Note: Was #1, now is on 3rd page. It's stuffed with ads, as it doesn't seem to matter wheter my pages have ads or not, and since I lost my rankings on thousands of pages at least I can probably generate a little more income like that. Thank you so much for the help you can provide!0 -
Follow/NoFollow?
I run Magento 2 and have two stores, one intended for the EU and one for the US. 99% of the products available appear on both stores, there is an automatic redirect in place to either store depending on your location. But I think Google is seeing these as duplicate products/stores. Should I add the Index,NoFollow tag to one of the two stores? My issue is that I want both stores to rank in their geographical locations and I am concerned that by adding the NoFollow tag is will stop that dead in its tracks for one location. Any advice would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots2 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Advice Needed: Why Is My Site Not Ranking Despite All The White Hat I Have Done?
Hi all, I have tried all white hat ways to make my local business website rank well in Google. We have done: 1.) Good quality content for our site on regular basis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chanel27
2.) Submit to Google sitemap
3.) Link in an ethical way
4.) Post on social media sites No Google Panda content farming
No Google Penguin unnatural linking In fact, we have more quality articles to share compared to other laundry dry cleaning websites in Singapore. Can anyone advice me on why my site is my ranking well? Site:
http://www.drycleaning.com.sg0 -
Help with setting up 301 redirects from /default.aspx to the "/" in ASP.NET using MasterPages?
Hi SEOMoz Moderators and Staff, My web developer and I are having a world of trouble setting up the best way to 301 redirect from www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to the www.tisbest.org since we're using session very heavily for our ASP.NET using MasterPages. We're hoping for some help since our homepage has dropped 50+ positions for all of our search terms since our first attempt at setting this up 10 days ago. = ( A very bad result. We've rolled back the redirects after realizing that our session system was redirecting www.tisbest.org back to www.tisbest.org/default.aspx?AutoDetectCookieSupport=1 which would redirect to a URL with the session ID like this one: http://www.tisbest.org/(S(whukyd45tf5atk55dmcqae45))/Default.aspx which would then redirect again and throw the spider into an unending redirect loop. The Google gods got angry, stopped indexing the page, and we are now missing from our previous rankings though, thankfully, several of our other pages do still exist on Google. So, has anyone dealt with this issue? Could this be solved by simply resetting up the 301 redirects and also configuring ASP.NET to recognize Google's spider as supporting cookies and thus not serving it the Session ID that has caused issue for us in the past? Any help (even just commiserating!) would be great. Thanks! Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TisBest0 -
Bing and Yahoo rankings
I must admit its every 3 months or so I check these listings 🙂 I would even admit we are that engrossed in google we forget these sites exist many times. I wanted to see if anyone had experience doing sep for these sites and what sort of techniques you used in order to help improve these rankings. I tend to get great listings on Yahoo for many sites but bing seems slightly different. Would love to find out some information on the algos on each of these.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0