Excluding Googlebot From AB Test - Acceptable Sample Size To Negate Cloaking Risk?
-
My company uses a proprietary AB testing platform. We are testing out an entirely new experience on our product pages, but it is not optimized for SEO. The testing framework will not show the challenger recipe to search bots. With that being said, to avoid any risks of cloaking, what is an acceptable sample size (or percentage) of traffic to funnel into this test?
-
Here is Google's official recommendations for website testing. According to them, no amount of cloaking is okay. Try using one of the other methods suggested.
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
-
Negative SEO - Spammy Backlinks By Competitor
Hi Everyone, Someone has generated more than 22k spam backlinks (on bad keywords) for my domain.Will it hurt on my website (SEO Ranking)? Because it is already in the top ranking. How could I remove all the spammy backlinks? How could I know particular competitior who have done this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Is this negative SEO? Should I disavow these links?
We have been doing our own internal link building for the last year and getting nice backlinks. As of the last few days, ahrefs is showing a lot of new links that seem very spammy. We have not hired anyone to do link building for us, and these are all being created on these sites under the same user name. There is a good amount of them popping up, and I fear we will be subjected to a google pentalty for unnatural links if its not addressed. My first question is, am I correct thinking this is negative seo, and not some random sites that picked up our content and is going across their affiliate websites? If so, then should I preemptively disavow all these links? Are there any good ways to stop this? How can I track who is placing these garbage links? Here are some examples of these bad links. I know I can find the webmaster via a whois but I think that really wont get me anywhere, but I could be wrong. Here are some examples of the links that started popping up yesterday and today. http://pligg-cms.info/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-relief
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DemiGR
http://www.sharklinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://factson37.com/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-forgiveness-website
http://social-marker.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-debt-forgiveness
http://makingbookmarks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://bookmarkingforseo.com/story.php?title=top-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://jadelinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options There are quite a bit more and they don't seem to be stopping. All of them look pretty much identical to this. Thoughts?1 -
A case of negative SEO?
We came across today some very strange forum postings. Essentially they look like some nonsense text followed by a list of "adult" terms. In the middle of the list, completely randomly and strangely our brand terms appear in the list. There are no links to anything. The only thing I can think of is that someone is trying to make our brand terms algorithmically associated with questionable "red flag" terms in the eyes of search engines. I have no idea why else this would be happening. Could this be a case of some kind of Fiverr negative SEO attack? Is there any risk? Doesn't seem like anything we can do about it...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
Is there such thing as white hat cloaking?
We are near the end of a site redesign and come to find out its in javascript and not engine friendly. Our IT teams fix to this is show crawlable content to googlebot and others through the user agents. I told them this is cloaking and I'm not comfortable with this. They said after doing research, if the content is pretty much the same, it is an acceptable way to cloak. About 90% of the content will be the same between the "regular user" and content served to googlebot. Does anyone have any experience with this, are there any recent articles or any best practices on this? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CHECOM0 -
Negative backlinks
Hi I have heard that penguin penalizes a site for bad backlinks. Do you think that it is true? Do you think that is possible for someone to penalize my website adding my link to some spam website? I'm worried that someone could do it...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | darkanweb0 -
How to run SEO tests you don't want to be associated with
A client has a competitor who is ranking above them for a highly competitive term they shouldn't really be able to rank for. I think I know how the site got there, and I think I can replicate it myself with a quick test, but it's definitely grey hat if not black hat to do so. I do not want my own sites and company to be damamged by the test, but i'd like to let the client know for sure, and also i'd love to know myself. The test should take about a week to run, there is no hacking involved or password stealing or anything damaging to another. How would you do such a test? I'm dubious about using my own server / site for it, but would a week really matter? Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lethal0r0 -
Showing pre-loaded content cloaking?
Hi everyone, another quick question. We have a number of different resources available for our users that load dynamically as the user scrolls down the page (like Facebook's Timeline) with the aim of improving page load time. Would it be considered cloaking if we had Google bot index a version of the page with all available content that would load for the user if he/she scrolled down to the bottom?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CuriosityMedia0 -
Is this Cloaking?
http://www.shopstyle.com/product/sephora-makeup-sephora-collection-glossy-gloss/233883264 This comparison shopping engine url shows googlebot something dramatically different than My frustration is that a comp shop takes retailers content and copies and duplicates it and then uses it to capture traffic and send sales to other retailers other than the original provider of the content. Although this is a javascript function and not explicit bot detection does this qualify as unethical cloaking?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tjgill990