The Fail
In this episode, Kaloyan Dimitrov, Enhancv’s SEO & Content Marketing Specialist, shares how an A/B testing experiment went wrong and nearly destroyed their SEO strategy. Despite being a proponent of continuous testing, a single oversight in this test led to significant negative impacts on their SEO performance and rankings.
The Details
What went wrong…
During the A/B testing experiment, Kaloyan’s team made carbon copies of their landing pages with slight variations in structure and content. However, they made a crucial mistake by forgetting to add the canonical link to one of the test pages for a critical landing page. This oversight caused the new page to start ranking lower in search results and subsequently led to a decline in organic conversions. It took nearly a year to recover their previous search rankings after fixing the canonical issue and removing the A/B testing.
What to learn from it…
From this experience, Kaloyan and his team learned valuable lessons about A/B testing and the potential risks involved. First, they realized the importance of setting up canonical links correctly to avoid issues with search rankings. Second, they recognized that making significant changes to a page’s structure and content during A/B testing can be risky. As a result, they now opt for continuous A/B testing instead of simultaneous testing with different URLs to minimize risks to their SEO performance. Additionally, they pay closer attention to the elements they test on their pages, focusing on changes that can have a meaningful impact on traffic.
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