Search Engine Optimization and A/B Testing: Marriage From Hell?

A few days ago, I was asked this rather unusual question after offering a SEO copy to a company. I was told that the company’s e-commerce team needed to test the SEO copy against their current landing pages and do some A/B testing on the SEO page that I had presented them with. So basically to put things in perspective, they would show different content to different users on the same page. It sounded a little bit strange to me, and knowing that crawlers would have so much trouble doing anything with such page, I immediately mentioned that was a “no-no.” There are several things that could happen in this so called A/B testing process. First of all, one should avoid writing code that would show different versions of the page to let’s say crawlers and people. That is Black Hat SEO. But even if you are not doing that, how are crawlers supposed to evaluate a page that changes its content on a random basis. I think the best way to go about this is to test a page using adwords or other paid search services and keep that separate from the page that you want to get ranked for search engines. Dynamic pages are technically very difficult to deal with so why add complexity to your SEO initiative when you can find a way around it?