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seo

You might be wondering whether Kameleoon affects your SEO or why your webpages were suddenly de-indexed after launching an experiment. This issue depends on your experiment setup.

How to identify and address SEO impact
  • Ensure Kameleoon is correctly installed to avoid any negative impact on performance.
  • Assign an equal percentage of traffic to each variation.
  • Confirm that no experiments have been running for more than two months, since bots may interpret prolonged experiments as inconsistent page displays for different visitors.
  • Evaluate Kameleoon's performance on your site using the Kameleoon Chrome Extension and Lighthouse. Check if the performance issues coincided with SEO impact.
  • Ensure that online experiments don't significantly alter the page elements affected by SEO (JS and CSS should not change most of the page).
  • Redirection
    • Do not redirect 100% of traffic to new URLs. If establishing a control version, it must redirect to the original URL.
    • Define a canonical URL in the HTML for both the original page and the redirect page. The canonical URL should be the same for both and refer to the page Google should index.
    • Ensure the page's HTML does not use a noindex meta tag.
      • <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
    • Use the variation native redirection option or Kameleoon.API.Core.processRedirect("newURL"), note document.location.href = "newURL".

Note: Kameleoon redirections are Javascript by default and temporary redirects (not 301 or 302).

  • Avoid "Black Hat" SEO practices:
    • Cloaking: Showing visitors and search engine bots different content to manipulate result rankings, which can occur if experiments are set up to exclude bots.
    • Duplicating content: If the redirect page is identical to the original, Google may regard it as duplicate content, negatively affecting the page ranking. Redirecting to the original page can help prevent SRM but might impact SEO.
    • Sneaky redirects: Don't send a visitor to a different URL than the one they clicked without their knowledge.
    • Hidden links and text: Avoid using hidden links and text visible to search engines but hidden from visitors. Techniques include matching text color to the background, using CSS to position the link off-screen, or setting the link size to zero.

Note: Kameleoon automatically filters bot traffic from your results. For more information, refer to this article.