Jitbit, a software company, writes about its help desk product, web security, SEO, remote work legal issues, and SQL interviewing.
HN commenters link it for the Google Authorship traffic drop story and the nofollow link risk; one user also says they used Jitbit for years.
Most A/B testing will fail when you're testing the wrong elements.
I have a challenge for you.
The examples you list are "top" of the funnel tests: buttons for engagement, a homepage redesign.
But when I go deeper into your funnel like your pricing grid page and cart checkout page, I see lots of tweaks that, in my experience, can drive the significant gains that you are looking for.
I'm going to use this page as my starting point, by way of example:
http://www.jitbit.com/hosted-helpdesk/purchase/
When I click order now on the "Startup" plan and get myself to the cart page here was my experience:
a) The load time on click to page load for checkout was >3 seconds for me. You can get some idea of why here http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ or here http://www.webpagetest.org/
b) Your design changes drastically between those pages, breaking the user's flow and attention. 37signals products do a nice job of maintaining conformity between pricing grid to checkout as an example.
c) You're treating a SAAS checkout like a product checkout - asking about quantity, list price, etc. What % of your users add multiple services to the cart? Can you keep this in more of a flow?
d) You have no visible security certificate on the page at all, when in fact even the placement of your security certificate on checkout can make a drastic impact in conversion eg http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placement-of-trust-logos-can-make-a-huge-difference-in-conversion-rate/
e) Yes,…
This is interesting
/**
* Sites that link to theannoyingsite.com may specify `target='_blank'` to open the
* link in a new window. For example, Messenger.com from Facebook does this.
* However, that means that `window.opener` will be set, which allows us to redirect
* that window. YES, WE CAN REDIRECT THE SITE THAT LINKED TO US.
* Learn more here: https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/256-targetblank---the-most-underestimated-vulnerability-ever/
*/
function attemptToTakeoverReferrerWindow () {
if (isParentWindow && window.opener && !isParentSameOrigin()) {
window.opener.location = `${window.location.origin}/?child=true`
}
}
I checked in Chromium 70 and this only seems to work on the same origin - attempting to access `window.opener` cross-origin results in
Uncaught DOMException: Blocked a frame with origin "https://example.com" from accessing a cross-origin frame
The article linked in the code [0] and the MDN page for window.opener [1] mention the use of `rel="noopener"` to prevent `window.opener` from being set, but that it's not supported in all browsers - particularly Firefox, which needs `noreferrer`. I am sure CORS headers also play a role in protecting from this. OWASP
calls this technique 'reverse tabnabbing' [2].
There's a demo [3] of the effect - you can manually inspect the first link and change the href to [4] and then click the link to test how cross origin requests work.
[0]…
That, plus:
* Echarts is about the only dependency in our project that I can upgrade - and be sure it never breaks anything. It is so well-thought in that regard. Upgrading for 3.x to 5.x? Sure! "npm update" and everything just keeps working smoothly. That is so refreshing to see these days. Unbelievable.
* It's both SSR-friendly and SPA-friendly. Being mostly vanilla-js, works seamlessly with both react/vue/apline AND with old-school rails/asp.net/php/whatever. Our app is pretty classic SSR (https://www.jitbit.com/) and I can construct my chart's JSON object on a server using some linq-queries and provide that to echarts.
* ...OR I can give it a reactive object from vue-based SPA. Dun matter, it just works.
* whenever we have to add some workarounds (like, showing hovering labels on a pie chart with a bold percentages or something) - I never have to dig into their sources. Almost anything has already been figured out. Easily googlable and "LLM-able".
> find a position that seems to involve a TON of manual work - automate all of it - and DO NOT TELL anyone
This reminds me the article "Now That's What I Call a Hacker" [1], where a guy left behind his automation scripts when switched companies, which revealed some extreme scripts, like:
> hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.
I'm putting this article and what you just said together. Now I think it's reasonable to believe there are a lot of IT professionals doing this, they are just hidden, because there is no reason to share this kind of works experience, as it makes sense in the competitive side of the industry.
[1] https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/249-now-thats-what-i-call-a-hacker/
A quick Google for "outlook autoreply headers" gave me https://www.jitbit.com/maxblog/18-detecting-outlook-autoreplyout-of-office-emails-and-x-auto-response-suppress-header/ -- a more comprehensive list of headers is available at https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-autoresponders
Will some things filter through this list? Undoubtedly, but I would be surprised if it's a significant percentage. Extremely high-volume lists probably need some more specific care, to be sure.
Just to follow up on this: I did check with the team, and the message that Jitbit received ("Search results clicks for http://www.jitbit.com/xxxxxxxx/ have decreased significantly") pertains to the amount of clicks per day, not clickthrough.
In other words, the message that Jitbit received--and that sparked this article--meant that Jitbit was getting less overall traffic from Google, not that clickthroughs had gone down. That's consistent with the site being affected by Penguin as well.