Google A/B Testing tool on homepages

Are sites using Google's A/B testing tool?

After running the 'A/B or multivariate testing' test on a few thousand homepages with the 'mbox', now the same test with Google's testing tool (and the same list of spam domains used to test).

According to Google's documentation, the typical element on a page would be 'Google Experiment' on a page that's being tested or a control.

The result of only 4 spam sites using Google A/B testing is quite a small number - the google tool seems much less used than mboxes - at least on homepages, according to this very limited sample of domains. 

All 4 domains show the same result for all user agents, as tested earlier on other domains. Not really a big surprise that sites that use Google A/B tool comply with Google SEO requirement regarding cloaking. 

Script timer: run vs pause script execution during certain hours

This quickly became a standard part of my scripts, especially when checking larger lists of sites over days and days,  like the checking the Alexa 1 million for use of 'schema' on the homepage.

Running these scripts from home, there are good times to run a larger amount of traffic over the shared internet connection: at night, usually.

This script snippet has three elements:

• a  variable to set the hours where it can run
• setting a variable to the current hour 
• comparing with a regex match if the hour is in the array, if yes, run, if no, pause

To use it, I edit the hours, start the script in a byobu on server, f6 to logout, check in a few days later and collect the data.

intime=' 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 22 23 24 '

while read -r line ; do
    hour=$(date +%H)
    if [[ $intime =~ $hour  ]] ; then
        echo "running now " $( date +%H:%M )

#script to execute, for example curl $line

# --------next part of the timer

else
    echo "sleeping and time is " $( date +%H:%M)
    sleep 10m
fi