Does Kameleoon have an impact on SEO? Why has my webpage been de-indexed?

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Experiment Intermediate Personalization Technical

What is SEO?

Google defines SEO as “the process of making your site better for search engines.”

For Google to effectively index your website, it expects the following:

  • Technical requirements (such as accessible and indexable pages)
  • Adherence to key best practices
  • Compliance with spam policies

Google offers extensive documentation on SEO, which can be accessed here:

Additionally, Google provides an SEO auditing tool called Lighthouse.

You might be wondering whether Kameleoon will affect your SEO or why your webpages were suddenly de-indexed after launching an experiment. Actually, it depends on how you set up your experiment.

Steps 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, as bots might interpret this as different page displays based on viewers.
  • Evaluate Kameleoon’s performance on the site using the Kameleoon Chrome Extension and Lighthouse. Check if the performance issues coincided with the SEO impact. Was a new experiment launched?
  • Ensure that online experiments don’t significantly alter the page elements affected by SEO. (JS & 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 should refer to the page that Google should index.
    • Ensure that the HTML of the page does not use a noindex meta tag.
      <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
    • Use the variation native redirection option or Kameleoon.API.Core.processRedirect("newURL"), not document.location.href = "newURL".

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

  • Avoid “Black Hat” SEO practices:
    • Cloaking: Showing visitors and search engine bots different content to manipulate search result rankings. This can be done by targeting experiments 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 initially clicked on 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, please refer to our documentation.