Follow these guidelines to stay SEO-friendly while testing variations.
Testing and personalization — including A/B and multivariate testing — won’t hurt your search engine rankings when done responsibly. In fact, Google encourages experimentation as long as you avoid cloaking, use canonical tags when needed, and keep content aligned with your SEO strategy.
Optimize uses best practices by default, so you can confidently run optimizations without risking your site’s visibility in search.
How Optimize stays SEO-compliant
Optimize treats search engine bots the same as any visitor — no cloaking or deceptive techniques. Bots see and experience the same variations your visitors do, so there’s no manipulation of search rankings. As long as your content is honest and valuable, you're good to go.
SEO-friendly testing tips
- Use keywords consistently — if you're testing headlines or body copy, keep your target SEO keywords in every variation
- Avoid major keyword removal — don’t swap out entire phrases that are core to your SEO strategy
- Don’t worry about small changes — updates like button text, layout, or colors have little to no effect on SEO
Redirects
Add canonical URL tags — if you're redirecting to alternate versions of the same page, using a rel="canonical" tag to point back to the original URL helps search engines understand that all versions are equivalent.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://original-page-url.com" />
Don't use 301 redirects — these types of redirect signal a permanent change, which can remove your original page from search indexes. Instead, use 302 or JavaScript-based redirects.
Good to know
Redirect variations do not use 301 redirects, so you're good to go with Optimize.
SEO tailored landing pages
Make sure not to combine unique landing pages that are built with different SEO intents. Only combine landing pages that share the same intent so that their combination doesn't impact the SEO of a deprecated landing page.
What about page speed?
Page load time is one of many factors Google considers. The Optimize snippet is lightweight and shouldn’t noticeably affect performance. Still, you can review tips on reducing page flicker to ensure a fast, smooth experience.