Build strategy for 2 modes

Design help Custom code
1

Hi,

I’m building a website which will have a toggle to choose between 2 different designs and slightly different content as well. What would be a good build strategy considering SEO and usability?

My current thoughts:

  • content should only appear once on the page (no duplication for SEO reasons)
  • need for a cookie to remember the toggle setting when clicking through site

I’d appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Thank you!

2

You may run into two issues with this;

  • Penalties for duplicate content if anything is duplicated
  • Penalties for hidden content ( a blackhat SEO technique ) if Google decides you’re trying to deceive Googlebot

The closes pattern this matches is a localization pattern where;

  • The variations are legitimate, e.g. US English vs. AU English
  • The pages follow hreflang cross-linking guidelines to reference other variants
  • The pages use the lang tag to indicate their own variant
  • The sitemap, etc all comply with the same approach

In this situation, the variants have a purpose, but the SEO-friendly mechanic is to clearly indicate “these are the same page, just intended for a different audience by locale or language”.

I’m hoping your reason for distinction can fit that model because it’s the cleanest one for your SEO.

If not, a plan B could be to have duplicate pages, but on the B variant, reference the A variant as the canonical. This will basically tell Google to ignore B, and focus SEO on A, which saves you both penalty risks… but only indexes A…

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3

Thank you! That makes sense. The reason for creating 2 different designs is pure marketing and showcasing a creative idea. So I think plan B would be the right strategy. I have experienced with that already, using page transitions to differentiate the 2 designs, but ran into usability issues: only having page transitions when switching designs instead of having them on all link clicks. Will give it some more thinking…

4

Ah got it, sounds a bit more like A/B testing.

I’ve never actually researched the SEO implications because generally I run A/B tests for a relatively short period of time, 1-2 weeks maximum per experiment.

If you’re trying to get stats on which approach give better conversions, you might look at using a platform like Optimizely.