Comment by BickNowstrom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BickNowstrom | Hacker News Reader

Though using A/B testing to improve user experience or conversion rates is fine, I thought using A/B testing to reverse engineer the ranking algorithm was against the guidelines. Has this been updated?

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7238431?hl=en

> Best practices for website testing with Google Search

> The amount of time required for a reliable test will vary depending on factors like your conversion rates, and how much traffic your website gets; a good testing tool should tell you when you’ve gathered enough data to draw a reliable conclusion. Once you’ve concluded the test, you should update your site with the desired content variation(s) and remove all elements of the test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and markup. If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly. This is especially true if you’re serving one content variant to a large percentage of your users.

Next to this, the advice is to use rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate issues with Googlebot crawling your variations. When using rel="canonical" this should not show you how a variation influences ranking.

> If you’re running an A/B test with multiple URLs, you can use the rel=“canonical” link attribute on all of your alternate URLs to indicate that the original URL is the preferred version. We recommend using rel=“canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your intent in this situation.

This is link is related to Conversation Rate Optimization testing (like Optimizely). We don't do A/B testing on single pages, or do cloaking or anything of the sort, but we run experiments across groups of URLs, and then we sum up the results and run our analysis.

Also, our goal is not to deceive Google in anyway - a lot of our tests are related to increasing CTR (which is testing humans) and on-page times. (again testing humans) Overall we're trying to make pages better according to Google guidelines -- which leads to a better experience for users.

Some more explanation of how it works here: https://www.rankscience.com/how-it-works

My post was in response to the homepage copy:

> RankScience sits next to your website, making thousands of experiments to tweak your HTML in order to improve your page rankings.

This seems to me an attempt at reverse engineering the ranking algorithm. Is my interpretation correct? And if so, is this allowed / in scope of the guidelines?

We're not reverse engineering Google's ranking algorithm, so no. : ) Good luck to anyone trying to do that! (I'd recommend against it) Yes, you're allowed to make changes to your pages.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you are trying to determine the effect that many different tweaks have on Google's ranking. You are not explicitly trying to reverse engineer their search algorithm, but, implicitly, you are trying to build a model of their model, and to then use your implicit model to drive up rankings.

Of course, the final determination is entirely up to Google, but this seems kind of a risky game to play.

Google's algorithm is to reward high quality websites which add value to their users. Our approach to SEO is to help our customers define "high quality" in Google's ever-changing definition and serve their quality to Google's users. This is exactly what Google wants.

Thanks! Though my (dated?) concern is probably not all that common, you could think of adding something like "Split-testing to improve SEO is a perfectly legitimate marketing technique" in your FAQ/technical copy.

Thanks for your feedback! That's a pretty good idea!

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