Over the years I have had many people indicate to me that one of the reasons that they have not done conversion tuning on their site is that they are afraid that they will be accused of cloaking by Google and lose their high position in the search results.
Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to the search engine spiders than to actual visitors to your site. In extreme cases this can be used as a bait-and-switch tactic to draw an audience to your page and then show them completely unrelated content. Obviously if a lot of websites did this, the trust level in search results would go down, and search engines would have a lot of heat directed at them.
Danny Sullivan blogged his concerns about this in his post on April 4, 2007 Google Website Optimizer Now Available, But Is It Cloaking?
On the other hand, search engines also want people to find relevant information, and the whole point of landing page optimization is to find out what appeals to your visitors.
We have been doing landing page optimization for many years and have never heard of anyone getting busted for cloaking during a test. As part of Google’s Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant program we have been asking for a long time for an official clarification of this position. It is finally here!
Official Google Policy FAQ Answer: How does Website Optimizer fit in with Google’s view of cloaking?
The conclusion is pretty definitive: landing page testing is not cloaking.
As long as you are running a legitimate test and do not completely change the theme of you page you are in the clear.
Google also suggests putting up your winning page after the test and removing your testing code.
So now that we have that out of the way – go start testing!
