What's the best way to A/B test new version of your website having different URL structure?

[_nitman]

Hi Mozzers,

Hope you're doing good. Well, we have a website, up and running for a decent tenure with millions of pages indexed in search engines. We're planning to go live with a new version of it i.e a new experience for our users, some changes in site architecture which includes change in URL structure for existing URLs and introduction of some new URLs as well.

Now, my question is, what's the best way to do a A/B test with the new version?

We can't launch it for a part of users (say, we'll make it live for 50% of the users, an remaining 50% of the users will see old/existing site only) because the URL structure is changed now and bots will get confused if they start landing on different versions.

Will this work if I reduce crawl rate to ZERO during this A/B tenure? How will this impact us from SEO perspective? How will those old to new 301 URL redirects will affect our users?

Have you ever faced/handled this kind of scenario? If yes, please share how you handled this along with the impact. If this is something new to you, would love to know your recommendations before taking the final call on this.

Note: We're taking care of all existing URLs, properly 301 redirecting them to their newer versions but there are some new URLs which are supported only on newer version (architectural changes I mentioned above), and these URLs aren't backward compatible, can't redirect them to a valid URL on old version.

[_nitman]

Hi Martijn,

Yeah, not planning to block them from robots.txt of course. By blocking, I meant reducing the crawl rate to ZERO temporarily to make sure we're not creating any URL related confusions for bots.

But, this might not be a good solution for our customers as customer might be redirecting to /new-url for the first hit, which might give him an error for in the next session.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Nitin,

Yes, that's why I mentioned that you should block these URLs via robots.txt so bots don't even find them in the first place.

[_nitman]

Hi Martijn,

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this, really appreciate that.

But, the problem here is, we're planning to launch some of the new urls which aren't backward compatible. Hence, exposing them to bots isn't a good idea, they won't work for old website.

Also, if I 301 redirect the /old-url to /new-url, would need to redirect it back to /old-url if hit goes to old website. This might confuse bots.

Btw, number of URLs affected by this is, the almost whole website i.e a very large number of indexed pages.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Nitin,

Don't change the crawl rate for an A/B test, it probably will hurt you more in the long run that it will do any good for the time being. In this case it also depends on how many URLs are affected by the change, if it's only 1 page that we will have a duplicate then I really wouldn't worry about it if it's a dynamic page with thousands of it then please make sure you will block these pages via the robots.txt so search engines won't find them in the first places.