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[HEADING=2]WoltLab Suite Core 5.5.1[/HEADING] Resolved an issue that prevented an upgrade from WoltLab Suite 5.4. Continue reading...

In a digital world with no shortage of places to connect, a beautiful theme will help you stand out from the crowd. We previously touched on the importance of branded communities, and now we’re unveiling new functionality that will help make your theme more functional: easy access to header and footer tabs within our new simple theme editor. Invision Community already has a powerful and advanced theme editor allowing total control over every aspect of your community’s UI, however this power comes at the cost of ease of use. We often get asked if there’s an easier way to add a site wrapper, or header and footer with some tweaks to the CSS without learning the compl…

Local SEOs are accustomed to continuous change in the SERPs, but if S.2992, the American Innovation Online Choice Act, becomes law and prevents monopolies like Google from preferencing their own assets, we need to prepare for what could be the largest search overhaul we’ve ever seen. This could be bigger than the day we saw 7-packs become 3-packs. It could be bigger than any of the major updates like Possum or Vicinity. We’re talking about major potential change and new opportunity for local businesses. Just how big might it be? That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today! [HEADING=1]Stats and tests[/HEADING] Per Moz’s most recent study by Dr. Peter J. Meyer…

Local search marketing is a form of publicity unlike any other because of its potential for creating positive social change. July 2022 is Independent Business Month and the perfect moment to reinvigorate our work as local SEOs by reflecting on the meaningful bigger picture to which we’re contributing. I’ve heard European social commentators say that you can’t publish books in America with the word “virtue” in their titles, but when an independent business owner opens their doors, it instigates a true virtuous cycle. When marketers have the honor of entering that cycle, we’re participating in something even more important than “traffic”, “conversions”, or “growth”; we’r…

A preview release of vBulletin 5.6.9 is now available for download. [HEADING=1]Front End Changes[/HEADING] [HEADING=2]Copy and Paste Image Uploads[/HEADING] Users can now use Copy and Paste to upload images into their posts. Users should be warned that image sizes may not be what they expected on paste. They can control the image size by hovering over an image and using the drag tool in the lower right corner. Users can also double-click (double-tap on a touch device) an image to bring up the properties window to change the size. [HEADING=2]WebP Image Support[/HEADING] Users will be able to upload images in the WebP format. These images are typically s…

The most exciting thing about visual search is that it’s becoming a highly accessible way for users to interpret the real world, in real time, as they see it. Rather than being a passive observer, camera phones are now a primary resource for knowledge and understanding in daily life. Users are searching with their own, unique photos to discover content. This includes interactions with products, brand experiences, stores, and employees, and means that SEO can and should be taken into consideration for a number of real world situations, including: Sponsorship implementation Brand merchandising In-person brand experiences Though SEOs have little…

You know your competitors, and you’re not going to let some damned SEO tool tell you different! Hey, I’ll give you the first part, but there are a lot of reasons that the results from a tool like True Competitor might not match your expectations, and that could be a good thing. I’m going to dig into five of those reasons: You’re living in the past You’ve hit a brick wall You can’t see the trees You’re stuck in one tree We’re just plain wrong First, the toughest one to hear — the world is changing, and you’re not changing with it. [HEADING=1]1. You’re living in the past[/HEADING] Look, I know Big Wally at Big Wally’s Wid…

Relevance is talked about a lot in the context of link building. In truth, it’s something that no one can really provide a concrete (or even close to concrete) answer to, because none of us knows exactly how Google measures relevance. Even having access to things like the Google Natural Language Processing API and seeing categories such as this doesn’t mean that we know how Google measures relevance themselves, because there will be so much more under the hood that isn't visible to the public. Even if we did know exactly how Google measures relevance, the extent to which they reward or penalize what they find as they crawl the web is also up for debate — like any ranki…

Just as you were absorbing all the Q1 local search excitement, Q2 came marching along with a bundle of new happenings and surprises. Don’t worry if you missed out on any of the key announcements and observations — I’ve got a little list for you here: [HEADING=1]1. Novel stats on persistent reviewers[/HEADING] Curtis Boyd included some statistics that I’ve never seen compiled before in his presentation at a LocalU conference. As captured in the above tweet from Joy Hawkins, 8% of unhappy customers or spammers whose first review is removed will come back and write another one. 60% of them will simply republish their initial review or one that’s quite similar, but 40…

Greetings everyone, We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.3.8 “Bertie: Beer and Summer”. This version is a maintenance release of the 3.3.x branch which introduces a deferred cache purge method and marks the PHP and INCLUDEPHP template functions as deprecated in order for them to be removed in a future release. It also resolves various issues reported in previous versions. Deferred cache purging allows Extension developers to trigger a cache purge as part of their code that is not executed until the end of the request. Therefore, the state of data and the cache will remain consistent during the lifetime of a single request. We have also decided to dep…

A preview release of vBulletin 5.6.9 is now available for download. [HEADING=1]Front End Changes[/HEADING] [HEADING=2]Copy and Paste Image Uploads[/HEADING] Users can now use Copy and Paste to upload images into their posts. Users should be warned that image sizes may not be what they expected on paste. They can control the image size by hovering over an image and using the drag tool in the lower right corner. Users can also double-click (double-tap on a touch device) an image to bring up the properties window to change the size. [HEADING=2]WebP Image Support[/HEADING] Users will be able to upload images in the WebP format. These images are typically s…

Google Autocomplete (often referred to as Google Suggest) is one of the first Google search developments that appeared on SEOs’ radar. Many years ago, Google Suggest was what powered Google Instant results, making a huge impact on users’ searching journeys. SEOs have been using it as a free keyword research tool. Yet there’s much more to this search feature, especially after all the updates Google has introduced, turning Google Autocomplete into a smart and predictive platform of its own. [HEADING=1]What is Google Autocomplete?[/HEADING] Google Autocomplete allows users to easily complete their query by suggesting possible extensions of what they are currently…

The release 5.5.0 RC 2 is now available and addresses multiple issues found in the previous version. The overall feedback was very positive and the overall stability of this version is very high. We‘re looking forward to release the final version of WoltLab Suite 5.5 soon. Continue reading...

Die Version 5.5.0 RC 2 ist jetzt verfügbar und behebt mehrere Probleme, die in der vorherigen Version gefunden wurden. Das Feedback fällt insgesamt sehr positiv aus und die allgemeine Stabilität dieser Version ist ausgesprochen gut. Wir freuen uns darauf, die finale Version von WoltLab Suite 5.5 bald zu veröffentlichen. Continue reading...

[HEADING=1]vBulletin Mobile Suite 2.8 Changes[/HEADING] Mobile Suite 2.8 is available to be built via the Mobile Publisher. Mobile Suite 2.8 adds support for Android 12, Display Name Support, viewing attached images within Blog posts, and Social Group creation. [HEADING=1]Resolved Issues[/HEADING] Support Android 12 Add Social Group Creation - General Settings Support Displayname Profile - UI - Texts are cut off in the My Profile page Scroll - Scrolling to the bottom of the page doesn't load the posts from the next page Displayname - The displayname is incorrect in the Articles page Blogs - Blogs don't display attached images Messages - M…

It’s a highly competitive market for SEO skills at the moment. But as a hiring manager, how do you ensure that you are selecting the right fit for your team, and not just the available candidates? It’s crucial for the well-being of your existing team, your prospective hires, as well as your SEO performance, to hire well. Who you hire, when, and in what order can come down to several factors. Working in-house may mean your budget for hiring SEOs is limited, so you might need to find someone who ticks a lot of skill boxes broadly, but less deeply. With an agency, or enterprise team, you may have the luxury of investing in a broad roster of talent where each individual is…

Last year, I pitched a series of technical SEO topics for local SEO on twitter and got lots of positive feedback. One of these elements of technical SEO that can feel extremely daunting and unfamiliar to local SEOs is speed optimization. There are some key scenarios when local SEOs should seriously consider speed optimization, even for a small local client. After all, these clients are still impacted by the issues that come along with having a slower website — such as higher bounce rates, lower conversions, and worst of all, a poor user experience. There are also plenty of instances where speed optimization is a practical next step in your SEO strategy. If yo…

Google holds over 85% of global desktop search traffic and gets billions of searches per day. Google’s advertising revenue through Google Ads was $209.49 billion in 2021, the majority of which came from search advertising. Google Ads is very competitive and Google uses an auction system to decide which ads to show. When a search query is made with a keyword that has multiple bidders, Google Ads runs an auction to determine which ads are eligible to be shown for that keyword and their ad positions. Only ads that meet minimum quality requirements will be shown for a relevant search term. With so much competition, how can advertisers improve their performance on Googl…

Competitive SERP analysis (including our recently launched Competitive Analysis Suite) is — by design — based on understanding the broader ecosystems of your ranking keywords. This is great if you’re an established business, but what if you’ve got a brand new site or are still developing your SEO strategy and aren’t ranking for many keywords? Consider, for example, the fictional site, Dice-E-Shop.com (shh.. just let me have this one). We plug it into True Competitor, wait for some magic to happen, and voila! Look at all the time you saved! Okay, it’s not ideal, but there is a solution, and I call it “Aspirational Analysis”. The basic idea is simple — find a f…

Google processes more than 8.5 billion searches every day. That’s more than 100,000 searches per second, thousands of which could lead a user to a purchase. It’s no wonder, then, that 60% of marketers list SEO as their number one inbound marketing priority. But generating organic traffic comes with challenges. Google has hundreds of billions of webpages in its index, competing for the top spots on search result pages. Not to mention, when you’re writing for search engines, you technically have two audiences: bots and humans. Let’s look at how these audiences compare and see who you should be writing for. [HEADING=1]Writing content for SEO: who to write for[/HE…