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Hey Moz Community!

I've been digging into the differences between server-side testing and client-side testing and had a generic question. Is it safe to run server-side A/B testing?

For example, if I want to Split Test the home page of a site and show 50% of my traffic one home page, and show 50% of my traffic a completely different (read: new template, new content, new CTAs, etc) home page, are there any implications to SEO and organic search?

I've spent about five hour researching and from what I can find A/B testing is acceptable as long as you don't show Googlebot different content or run A/B tests on Googlebot. Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google, has stated that A/B testing does not impact search rankings. "A/B or split testing or other forms of testing web sites is okay by Google as long as you don't test GoogleBot or don't treat GoogleBot differently."

The biggest concerns for SEO cloaking, so from my understanding, for server-side testing, you'd need to do user-agent based redirection so that Googlebot (or any search bot) gets the normal version of the home page. The bots shouldn't be part of the test. Technically that is cloaking, but intention-wise, we're not trying to be sneaky. I've also read through this article about experimentation from Google developers here.

Am I missing anything here or is there a definitive answer? If we serve a “B” as a different site for user testing, just exclude google bot by user-agent and we’re good? THANKS!

Thanks for the help here Matt! We've had issues in the past with penalties from unnatural linking networks derived from subdomains, so that will certainly be a focus here. Appreciate it!

Hello! Does anyone have any experience with the pros/cons for where to host storefronts as an ecommerce solution provider. I'm looking for a recommendation on where to house the stores/websites people create with our software (think of us like a shopify/squarespace).

What are the pros & cons of creating stores on the main domain name “brand.com” versus buying a new top level domain name who’s only purpose will be to hold all the subdomains, such as “mybrand.com”, or even “.my.brand.com”.

store.brand.com <— subdomain our our primary domain
store.my.brand.com <— subdomain of a subdomain 
store.mybrand.com <— subdomain of a throw-away domain

Weebly/Squarespace/Tictail go with the first option (store**.weebly.com** and store.squarespace.com). Shopify goes with the 3rd option (store.myshopify.com)

Are there any advantages or disadvantages to one or the other? Am I missing any other options? Thanks in advance!