FYI on detecting Googlebot for A/B tests

[Maile Ohye]

Hi, Split looks great! Really cool stuff. Just wanted to give a heads-up that Google recommends to treat Googlebot as a regular user (i.e., don't detect the bot to serve a specific set of content -- even if the content is the original version).

For the Google Webmaster Blog post on testing:

[ No cloaking.
Cloaking—showing one set of content to humans, and a different set to Googlebot—is against our Webmaster Guidelines, whether you’re running a test or not. Make sure that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content variant to serve, based on user-agent. An example of this would be always serving the original content when you see the user-agent “Googlebot.” Remember that infringing our Guidelines can get your site demoted or removed from Google search results—probably not the desired outcome of your test. ]