Search Engine Optimization News Blog

The Google Website Optimizer came out of beta in April, and provided webmasters with the ability to run concurrent tests on landing page variants besides other things.

The down side to the program was the inability to shut down a variation once it became apparent that it would not be successful. You had to set up a whole new test to exclude discarded scenarios, and that was a real pain.

With the new update, webmasters can use ‘Experiment Pruning’ to disable combinations which show themselves to be unstable or low producing. This makes it much easier to load up all your desired variations and eliminate non-contenders one by one.

Google’s Optimizer will even let you know when one of your variations starts to emerge as a ‘high confidence’ variant - and this can help you narrow the field even faster.

You can also use the offline capability to ensure your pages are properly tagged - Test pages that aren’t accessible can be evaluated simply by uploading a copy of the tagged source code and Optimizer will verify it is tagged correctly.

Nifty, very nifty.