• Tweet
• 

• Tweet
• 

If you have a website and trying to make some money from it, then I recommend you to take appropriate steps to handle the site performance to attract the genuine traffic and potentials users to your blog for earning money online. Most of the professional bloggers will be performing simple site testing for verifying whether the end-users can interact with a website or web application. Website testing is often used by online businesses (like online purchasing or selling) to ensure that their sites are live and responding. It helps to simulate the actions of thousands of visitors to a website and observe how it responds. They also simulate visitors across multiple geographies and servers Internet connections.

What is Website Testing ?

Website testing is normally done by trying out various versions of a website so that we may know exactly how the potential end-users and blog readers react to each version. We normally use a software to collect data and check which version prompts users to take an action that you want them to take. This gives you a good idea of which version results in increased sales. Coming to the point .
there are two different types of website testing procedures, namely —

1. A/B Testing
2. Multivariate Testing

1. A/B Testing Vs. Site Performance :

In A/B testing, we generally create multiple version of pages and give their own URLs. And when users try to access a single URL, it redirects  to another URLs you made with different version. This process is used to compare the user’s behavior for both the URLs to know which version is perfect and most effective to increase the site performance.

2. Multivariate Testing Vs. Site Performance :

This testing procedure is entirely different from the earlier one. In A/B testing we used multiple URLs to redirect from single URL to the different one and all the pages were purely static. While in Multivariate testing we use single URL with various variations inserted dynamically on the page. In short only one URL is involved and the variations are inserted dynamically on the page. These variations will change the different parts of your website on the fly with the help of a software and this software will show variations of each of these sections to users in different combinations and then statistically analyze which variations are the most effective to increase and boost the site performance.

Google’s Recommendations to enhance Site Performance:

• No Cloaking:

  

  It is nothing but a trick of showing one set of content to humans or the blog readers, and a different set to Googlebot or search engines. This practice is done while running a test. Make sure that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content variant to serve, based on user-agent. An example of this would be always serving the original content when you see the user-agent “Googlebot.”

• Use rel=“canonical”:

  

  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. Google recommends using rel=“canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag if you are testing variations on your homepage. You don’t want search engines to not index your homepage,  would you ? Instead you want them to understand that all the test URLs are close duplicates or variations by using rel=“canonical”. Using noindex rather than rel=“canonical” in such a situation can sometimes have unexpected effects on site performance and for some reasons Googlebot choose one of the variant URLs as the canonical, and as a result “original” URL might not be indexed by google since it would get treated as a duplicate.

• Use 302′s, not 301′s:

  

  Everyone knows that 301 redirect is permanent redirect and 302 redirect is temporary. So Google recommends us to use 302′s instead of using 301 to indicate that the URL’s are temporary while doing A/B testing. This will be as long as you’re running the experiment and they keep the original URL in their index rather than replacing it with the target(duplicate URL) of the redirect.

• Test only when it’s necessary:

  

  It is very important to take necessary action as soon as you finished with your website testing. Google recommends us to remove all the duplicate URL’s used in A/B testing, JavaScripts used in Multivariate testing and other Markups. If Google discovers these duplicate URL’s and scripts running even after completion of site test, then they probably ban or noindex your website. So be careful in these cases.

  Website testing plays significant role in enhancing your site performance status in the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. But its all Us who needs to save ourselves from getting penalised by Search Engines.