Paid landing pages

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Richard Hearne: If you migrate a winning challenger to the homepage spot then of course you should remove any NOINDEX directive that the page had as a test challenger, and the homepage should always self-canonicalise. The human error you mention would not be welcome at all, so great care should be taken to avoid that particular misstep.
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  Yuliana Kronrod: Richard Hearne definitely don`t want that to happen. Do you see any issue with canonicalizing vs noindex for the test HP?
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  Richard Hearne: Yuliana Kronrod what`s the goal of the test? What hypothesis is being tested here?
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  Yuliana Kronrod: CTA variations
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  Stockbridge Truslow: I agree with Richard - your landing page for the paid search is going to have traffic keyed from only the keywords you`ve bought and nothing else. The traffic is more specifically targeted and may be better or worse qualified than traffic going in organically to the main home page. You can`t learn much that way. If you really want to see which of two pages is converting better - look up A/B Split Testing and read a bit. There are plenty of tools for most CMS systems that will help you randomly (and evenly) split which page is seen as a landing page. Google Analytics has tools to help you track which one is converting better, too. It can be a bit daunting when you first look at it because it`s sometimes got a bunch of steps to set up properly - but most tools for most CMS`s will have plenty of walkthroughs, documentation, and even sometimes videos (if that`s your thing) to help you through it.
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  Yuliana Kronrod: And for more context - split tests of the homepage are being run independently of the paid program, with yet another version of the homepage that’s canonicalized and not noindexed.