Google Launches Website Optimizer

Rockgod writes "Google Analytics Senior Manager Brett Crosby unveiled the tool, called Google Website Optimizer, this morning at the eMetrics summit in Washington D.C. If you find web site traffic heat maps like CrazyEgg, ClickDensity or Google Analytics' own heat map interesting, this looks like the next generation of that kind of tool. If Google's Website Optimizer can score high on usability, I expect it to be a big hit with small and medium size website publishers."

That's great and all...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but what is it?

Enhancing your ability to get ads

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Or enhancing advertisers' ability to get your eyeballs.

Either way, it's not for us.

This may be useful

[x-vere]

I think this is cool. Google Adwords is somewhat of a statistical pain in the butt. I've spent hours upon hours of my life analyzing keywords, click rates, etc. for pushing more traffic to various sites on the web. If this tool eases that pain, even just a little, I say it is a good thing. Google needs us to succeed with AdWords as much as we want to succeed.

Mixed Feelings

[Sv-Manowar]

Google giving advice is always going to help two sets of people - those who already have websites and want to optimise them, and those who are attempting to create websites to rank highly. If we look at why people creating websites usually want to get them to rank highly google the reasons are primarily monetary, which means that this tool is mainly giving advice to those who are trying to displace older (and possibly better sites). Say I have site A. which is dedicated to mountain biking news and has been running since 1997 with messageboards, news etc and hasn't been optimised for the best google rankings and we have Site B. which was created 3 months ago and uses RSS syndication to just serve up content from other sites and monetising it with something like adsense is the main point, then which should really rank higher in Google? I'm thinking A because it is more of a legitimate site.

I think there is a point where trying to rank highly in Google is OK for wanting to growth in your site, but if Google continue to give out such tools then surely people will start producing sites that match exactly what it wants to see in order to get traffic. I'm starting to think that it shouldn't be sites that have to be optimised for Google to rank them highly, but Google to be optimised to pick up the best sites for each search term instead of landing pages or shells that are just there for advertising revenue.

If google really want to optimize things..

[Channard]

.. how about they send some kind of robot around their search listings, to delist any page that is little more links to another page. I've been looking for something and found links to a site that's basically links, which links to another site made up of links etc..

Re:Optimising Slashdot

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Why was the parent marked "Off Topic"? The comment is absolutely right - this service has nothing whatsoever to do with HTML validation. It's a technique for getting more sales on your site by testing different combinations of headings / content in adverts to find out what works best.

Rich.

Re:"algorithm" ..or google users?

[tomhudson]

I'm somewhat unclear on this, and I watched 80% of the flash demo linked above before getting insanely bored (mostly due to the pace) and letting my ADHD take over.

OMG I must have ADHD as well - I couldn't stand more than 30 seconds of it - just clicked on every link in the left-hand side, saw it was "more of the same" ... and was out of there!

Maybe if we want real information (like a web page that describes it) we should just google for it ... oops ... "google website optimizer" just returns articles that link to the same damn presentation.

Maybe google should have practiced what they preach and done their own "web site optimization" by having several different versions (flash, web pages) available. Didn't they get the memo - flash-only is evil?

Re:Optimising Slashdot

[BetterThanCaesar]

The original poster's joke was probably that Slashdot used to block the W3C validator. It does not anymore, however.

Re:Enhancing your ability to get ads

[xENoLocO]

I agree google analytics is helpful. However, it also increased my page load times by a long shot, so it had to be removed. It simply doesn't serve fast enough.

So I took a look at my netvibes homepage and now I use who they use, statcounter.com... it's simpler than google analytics, loads a lot faster, and you can see the results in real time.

the Real website optimizer

[a.d.trick]

And the winner is: w3.org [w3.org]. The CSS section [w3.org] is probably the most useful part of it, but the whole thing is heartily recommended. To test you level of optimization there is an automated tool for HTML markup [w3.org] as well as one for CSS [w3.org].

Re:"algorithm" ..or google users?

[ffrinch]

Because with Google you can do it faster and easier, with pretty reports showing you the results, and put your time into other projects.

Why use Postnuke instead of writing your own "ugly portal site" software?