About Dynamic Yield’s Impact on SEO
Dynamic Yield helps marketers increase revenue by personalizing each customer interaction across web, mobile apps and email. Personalization is achieved by serving dynamically generated content with various implementation methods using JavaScript.
As the impact of JavaScript-injected content on sites’ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has yet to be comprehensively determined, below is a summary of experiments conducted to determine how Dynamic Yield’s dynamic content affects sites’ SEO, including Google crawling and indexation.
Our validation method included the use of unique strings in order to identify dynamic content and recommendation campaigns in (Google) search results. Google crawls and indexes Dynamic Yield’s JavaScript-based content. Content generated using Dynamic Content and Recommendations is shown as plain text in Google’s search engine results page (SERP) with any implementation (manual code embedding, automatic embed by choosing a selector, or when implementing via JS of a Custom Code campaign).
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Understanding The Risks During Website Optimization
From a technical point of view, there are four main risks to consider when optimizing websites:
1. Cloaking
Cloaking involves presenting one version to search engine bots and a different version to human users, for the purpose of manipulating and improving organic rankings. This is a huge issue in terms of SEO risks and a harsh foul against Google’s official Webmaster Guidelines. Running optimization initiatives that target specific variations to search engines User-Agents (such as “GoogleBot”) and others to human visitors is considered cloaking, and a big no-no.
At Dynamic Yield, as a strict principle, we always treat Googlebot and other search bots the same way we treat real human visitors. With Dynamic Yield, your optimization or personalization initiatives will never be considered cloaking manipulations.
2. Wrong Type of Redirect
When redirecting visitors to separate URL variations (such as with split tests), the official guidelines instruct to always use a temporary HTTP response status code (302 Found) or a JavaScript-based redirect. As a general rule of thumb, never use a 301 Moved Permanently HTTP response code. The 302 redirect request will help search engines understand that the redirect is temporary and that the original, canonical URL should remain indexed.
Notice that at Dynamic Yield, we’re only offering temporary (302) or JavaScript-based redirects (depending on what you’re trying to achieve). Since we’re (almost entirely) running on the client-side, 301 redirects are not even an option for our clients.
3. URL and Content Duplications
URL Duplications – Sometimes, when running online experiments, the system duplicates some of the site’s URLs for different test variations. Generally speaking, from an SEO point of view, on-site duplications are a relatively minor risk in terms of a real penalty, unless they were initially created as an attempt to manipulate organic rankings. Nevertheless, to resolve this possible risk, we recommend a fairly easy fix -implementing a Canonical tag element on each duplicated URL. It is also possible to block access to those duplications using a simple Robots.txt Disallow command or a Robots meta tag with a noindex value.
Content Duplications – With on-site optimization and personalization, websites deliver different content variations that are tailored for different individuals. When the original content plays a big part in determining a web page’s organic rankings, it is vital to keep this content on-site, instead of replacing it with a fully dynamically generated content. In addition, keeping the original content can also act as a failover mechanism for unsupported test groups or individuals.
4. Web Loading Performance
We all know site speed is a major user experience issue and a deal-breaker. It has also been incorporated in Google’s organic web search ranking algorithms since 2010, among 200+ other ranking signals. Some users are concerned that optimization and personalization tools may negatively affect the loading time of their webpages,
and the truth of the matter is that sometimes it just might. But there are ways of minimizing the effect.
To start, Dynamic Yield’s script is loaded asynchronously and as such, does not affect page load time. Additionally, we work with Amazon Cloud Servers and deliver content directly through its CDN servers.
We can also send content to your company’s own CDN, if needed. Lastly, it is important to note that we have an uptime of almost 100%. We power more than 10B page views a month with some of the world’s most demanding customers, who wouldn’t stand for latency on their site and most likely, neither would you.
Summary
- Results on search results pages as seen above are valid for all Dynamic Yield implementation methods.
- Google acknowledges the use of A/B testing as a conversion optimization solution.
- You should be testing all the time and improving your site and overall user experience.