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
-
Lost ALL my rankings
Dear experts, We have suddenly lost all our positions on our keywords, I’m talking for example from position 2 to 35 in one huge drop ☹ . Even when you search for our name and domain name namely “KV16”, the main page does NOT come up. (We do however still get the local business / map result on the right side!) I have looked in google search console, but nothing to see here – no penalty. However, I need to mention, that we just now, after the issue, setup the google search console – so maybe that is why there is no information about a penalty!? (If the problem is a penalty, btw we have not been doing any link building!) One year ago, we made a permanent redirect from our old site, www.kontoret-gammeltorv.dk, because we moved our coworking office, to a new location, and needed a new name – (because the old name is referring to a location, hence no longer made sense.) This worked flawlessly, and we got all the link juice, and the new site ranked just as good as the old one. Aprox four months ago, we made some changes to the site, where we amongst other things, changed the title description on the frontpage, focusing more on another keyword – and doing this we unknowingly change the permalink to the frontpage (in WordPress). I have read that this can do some real damage, however its so long ago, that it seems unlikely to be the cause!? Please help!? Thanks a million, in advance. Cheers, Christian pJp4Uyx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Christian_T0 -
Creating Individual Posts w/ Excerpts from Expert Columns On Your Website
Hey Moz Fam! I have a question regarding adding excerpts from guest posts/expert columns to your website. The reason this came up to begin with is we want to find a way to track ALL our social media posts engagement. When we share guest posts links, we obviously cannot track when someone clicks it since its not going to our own website. The idea was if we create an individual page with an excerpt from the guest post, then add a "read full post" button that links back to it, we could then instead share that excerpt post from our website to social media so we can track it. Then the user could go to view the full post on the actual guest article from there if they wish. We wanted to create a page titled "Media" and have all those posts categorized to fall on that page. Then canonicalize all of the individual posts to the top level media page. My question is... we've spent a lot of time and money on creating pages with unique quality content and updating any thin content to make it not thin. These new excerpt pages will be thin content, is that going to negatively impact our SEO? We're not trying to rank these excerpt pages or anything. I just want to make sure that adding these excerpt posts with only 100-200 words each is not going to hurt our overall SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too): Here's how they show up: Example 1: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2 Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data): URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/ Linked From: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site) http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html Example 3: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html How do I address this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmehta10 -
Duplicate/ <title>element too long issues</title>
I have a "duplicate <title>"/"<title> element too long" issue with thousands of pages. In the future I would like to automate these in a way that keeps them from being duplicated AND too long. The solution I came up with was to standardize these monthly posts with a similar, shorter, <title>, but then differentiate by adding the month and the year of the post at the end of each <title>. Hundreds of these come out every week, so it is hard to sit there and come up with a unique <title> every time. With this solution the <title> tags would undoubtedly be short enough, however my primary concern is, would simply adding the month and year at the end of each <title> be enough for Google/Moz to decide it is not a duplicate? How much variation is enough for it not to be deemed a duplicate <title>? </p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Domaim.com/jobs?location=10 is indexed, so is domain.com/jobs/sheffield
Whats the best way you'd tackle that problem? I'm inheriting a website and the old devs had multiple internal links pointing to domain.com/jobs?location=10 (plus a ton of other numbers assigned to locations) and so they've been indexed. I usually use WMTs parameter tool but I'm not sure what the best approach would be other than that. Any help would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us. Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog). We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum. We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to: 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed. Submit new site maps to search engines. Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.). Send out a newsletter to our subscribers. Update our forum members. Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure. Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period? OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains? Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally! Thanks Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWJames0 -
Sudden rank drop for 1 keyword
A page of mine (http://loginhelper.com/networks/facebook-login/) was ranking in the top 10 for keyword (facebook login) and has been for at least 2 months, moving between 5th and 10th. Suddenly in the last 3 days the rank for the keyword dropped from 7th to 46th, yet none of the other keywords have been affected (they target other pages) and their ranks have continued to improve. I am trying to figure out what caused this sudden drop in the ranking of 1 page (the page has quality mainly text based content and isn't in the least bit shallow or spammy) I have been thinking perhaps a crawl or server error may be to cause leaving the page temporarily unavailable or with a big load time... Otherwise what could cause one page to drop so much so quickly whilst other pages improved their rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netboost0