Hello guys,

One of our clients is planning to have a new landing page for any users hitting the site for the first time. (returning users will still see the current homepage based on cookies ... in other words, the site would technically have 2 home pages). According to this client, they are planning to do something like this:

• https://www.websitename.com/ (for returning visitors)
• https://www.websitename.com/newuser (for first time visitors)

Our instinct is that is not great to have 2 home pages (that would affect the SEO campaign we are managing for this company) and we are not sure how to handle this. That's why we would appreciate your opinion regarding this topic:

• From an SEO perspective, do you think this is a good idea?
• If not, what would you guys do differentiate first-time visitors vs returning visitors without affecting SEO? Maybe just a pop-up?

Thanks in advance for your help !

Thank you for all of your responses.  Dan Siroker, nice to see you responding- too thank you.  I suppose I am left with that if I do use/need the function in Optimizely where I need to re-route to new url is to potentially use rel-canonical and block the second page in robot.txt.   I feel that for basic landing page testing, I would not re-route and Optimizely seems like a great and easy solution and I will use it.  For tests which would require re-routing, I am thinking perhaps Google optimizer is better because I am confident they will not penalize for re-route when they are the ones doing it.  Dan, if you feel different, I'd be happy to get on phone to chat.  Thank you all.  Best,  Robert

Hi Ryan, thank you for response.  There are two ways to test with them.  The type of testing I would want to do would apparently (according to sales guy) require an alternative landing/home page.

I am looking into signing up with www.optimizely.com for conversion testing.  They put scripting on my site which will then redirect half of my site visitors to an alternate home page.  The site I want to test on is ranking quite well with Google and I do not want to hurt my rankings.

And with this set up,what Google will think is my home page is not and so I am essentially sending visitors to a different page than Google reads as my home page in source code.

So, my concern is whether this will have a negative impact on my SEO rankings to redirect 50% of site visitors to a different page using this testing tool?

I would use Google Web Site Optimizer, but many of my sites are in Wordpress and it seems that Wordpress and web site optimizer are not so compatible.

Advice would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Robert

I am looking into signing up with www.optimizely.com for conversion testing.  They put scripting on my site which will then redirect half of my site visitors to an alternate home page.  The site I want to test on is ranking quite well with Google and I do not want to hurt my rankings.

And with this set up,what Google will think is my home page is not and so I am essentially sending visitors to a different page than Google reads as my home page in source code.

So, my concern is whether this will have a negative impact on my SEO rankings to redirect 50% of site visitors to a different page using this testing tool?

I would use Google Web Site Optimizer, but many of my sites are in Wordpress and it seems that Wordpress and web site optimizer are not so compatible.

Advice would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Robert