Google Website Optimizer wants you to create different versions of the same page you want to test. Doing this in plain vanilla HTML would be straight up and down.

However, at first glance, Silverstripe would include every single variant within the hierarchy and place them in the navigation system.

Is there an easy way to create variants without having them show up on the site?

Sure.. Just de-select "show in menu" and/or "show in search" in the behaviour tab.

I have actually created a static page that I wanted to use as my variant and all goes well until *ka boom* I put in Google's crappy javascript code.

In order to get Google's Website Optimizer to work I will need to remove the content negotiation (they insist on having unescaped <s in their script code within the body element)

How can I change the MIME type settings of Silverstripe back to text/html?

i'm new here, hope you all help me if i meet any problems.

Put ContentNegotiator::disable() in _config.php

To address the issue of adding variant pages to SilverStripe, you could do it by creating additional templates:

* Page.ss
* Page_versionb.ss
* Page_versionc.ss

You can then access the different templates as:

http://www.mysite.com/my-page/ --> Page.ss, this is what normal visitors see
http://www.mysite.com/my-page/versionb --> Page_versionb.ss
http://www.mysite.com/my-page/versionc --> Page_versionc.ss

If you wanted to randomly send people to versionb and versionc, you could probably set up some kind of random redirector in Page_Controller::init().