No, use of VWO does not have a negative impact on your website ranking. For A/B and Multivariate tests, both the control and variations run on the same URL and test changes are made by VWO on the fly. There is no scope for content duplication which otherwise can affect your SEO ranking.
Even though Google crawlers support JavaScript and the variation page of A/B test campaign can be crawled by Google bots, they do not affect the performance of the A/B website. Google also has its own A/B testing solution which would not exist if such tests affected rankings of the website.
However, SEO issues may crop up when you are running a Split URL test. To avoid the issue, use query parameter rel=”canonical” in the variation URL to avoid duplicating content. For example, in your Split URL test, there are two pages (say, http://vwo.com/A.php and http://vwo.com/B.php). When visitors land on http://vwo.com/A.php, half of them are redirected to http://vwo.com/B.php that contains some duplicate content on it.
In such a scenario where you don’t want B.php to affect your SEO, avoid content duplication. To do so, add the following code to B.php, that is, the noncanonical page:
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://vwo.com/A.php" />
</head>
While Google will index both the pages, by adding the above code, you are telling Google to use only http://example.com/A.php for SEO purposes. Here’s the Google link on using canonical URLs.
The following are best practices for creating and running tests on your website. You can refer to the original article from Google here.
- Don’t cloak your test pages
NOTE: To know what is cloaking, refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking.
- Use rel=”canonical” links
- Use 302 redirects, not 301 redirects
- Run the experiment only as long as necessary
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