Hi, I've got an SEO related question. If we use feature flags or do A/B test, a search engine bot will also get affected by this since we plan on doing server side testing. If we would hide an important content block in our test this might have a negative impact. Is there a way that we can prevent search engines to be part of experiments, and always receive the "default" version of the page?

you can check for the user agent and exclude them, but google doesn't recommend that. Usually the duration of the test is not that significant enough to impact SEO meaningfully. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/website-testing

Ok Great thx, I'll take a look at that info.

I'd also recommend to try your best to not AB test any technical SEO data like indexing, schema microdata, canonicals or hreflangs. Google's link juice usually takes about 5-30 days to fully reflect any technical changes. My understanding is this is true for keywords as well, but keywords are useful to AB test IMO. This will help determine what searches match your page on google while the technical SEO helps with ensuring you are top ranked on any page result / shown in any rich result. Obviously, do your own research 🙂