WordPress has released version 6.7, codenamed Rollins. This update introduces better font controls, a new default theme, enhanced design tools for easier page creation, 65 accessibility improvements, and performance optimizations. Version 6.7 focuses on making it easy to build attractive, high-performance websites.

Twenty Twenty-Five Theme

Twenty Twenty-Five is the new default theme that ships with WordPress. Twenty Twenty-Five was purpose intentionally built to offer users an easier and more intuitive experience for creating websites.

The official WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five documentation explains:

“While ideating Twenty Twenty-Five, one recurring idea was that simple things should be intuitive while complex things should be possible. This concept of simplicity and complexity leads to a reliable foundation for extending a default WordPress experience to make it yours.

Twenty Twenty-Five embodies ultimate flexibility and adaptability, showcasing the many ways WordPress enables people to tell their stories with many patterns and styles to choose from.”

The key improvements are:

• Better Patterns
  WordPress patterns are pre-designed ready to use blocks for different parts of a page. This allows users to choose from pre-made sections of a web page like the header, call-to-actions, pricing tables and on. Twenty Twenty-Five ships with a wide range of patterns that are appropriate for different kinds of sites.
• Improved Styles
  Better support for fonts in multiple languages plus bundled color variations.

New Templates
There are three base templates that can serve as a starting point for creating a website.

The new template versions are:

• Personal Blog (Default)
  The Personal Blog template is focused on simplicity and ease of use.
• Photo Blog (Alternative)
  This template has multiple layouts that are suitable for image heavy sites.
• Complex Blog (Alternative)
  This template is intended for complex websites, offering more design flexibility.

Typography

As part of the emphasis on a better design experience, WordPress 6.7 features better font management that allows users to more control over fonts.

The WordPress announcement explains:

“Create, edit, remove, and apply font size presets with the next addition to the Styles interface. Override theme defaults or create your own custom font size, complete with fluid typography for responsive font scaling.”

New Zoom Out Feature

WordPress 6.7 has a new design feature that lets users zoom out from the details and see what the site looks like as a whole so that users can swap out block patterns and see what it looks like in macro view. This is in keeping with the focus on making it easy to design attractive websites.

Accessibility Improvements

The documentation for WordPress 6.7 was not as organized as it usually is, making it difficult to navigate to the documentation for the 65 improvements to accessibility are. WordPress documentation is usually better but it seems less organized this time.

This is what the announcement said about the accessibility improvements:

“65+ accessibility fixes and enhancements focus on foundational aspects of the WordPress experience, from improving user interface components and keyboard navigation in the Editor, to an accessible heading on WordPress login screens and clearer labeling throughout.”

Performance Updates

The latest version of the WordPress core ships with faster pattern loading and better PHP 8+ support. Old code (deprecated) is removed to create a more lightweight theme, plus a new auto size component that improves lazy-loading images.

That last improvement to lazy loading should help improve core web vitals scores because the Auto Sizes feature helps the browser select the right image size from the CSS and use that to build the web page, rather than using the image size itself. CSS is usually downloaded before images, so having to depend on image size is redundant and slower. Chrome shipped with this ability last year, December 2023.

Engineering lead at Google Chrome Addy Osmani tweeted about it last year:

“Chrome is shipping <img sizes=”auto”> support for lazy-loaded images with srcset, this allows the browser to use the layout width of the image in order to select the source url from the srcset.

For lazy-loaded images, CSS is often available before the image load begins. The browser can take the actual width of the image from CSS and use that as if it was the image’s sizes.”

The official WordPress announcement for the auto sizes for lazy loading explains:

WordPress documentation for the auto sizes feature explains:

“WordPress 6.7 adds sizes=”auto” for lazy-loaded images. This feature, which was recently added to the HTML specification, allows the browser to use the rendered layout width of the image when selecting a source from the srcset list, since lazy loaded images don’t load until after the layout is known.”

Is It Safe To Download WordPress 6.7?

Most developers discussing the latest version of WordPress in the private Dynamic WordPress Facebook group report that updating to the latest version is easy and trouble-free.

But some developers reported maintenance mode errors that were easily resolved by deleting the .maintenance file (maintenance mode file. The .maintenance mode error doesn’t happen because there’s something wrong with the update, it’s usually because there’s something going on with the upstream server that’s providing the update. The WordPress.org 6.7 documentation page was temporarily down so maybe the WordPress servers were experiencing too much traffic.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero

An interesting discussion emerged on Twitter inspired by an article written by Jono Alderson. The article proposes thinking about Schema.org structured data markup as a way for emerging AI technologies to better understand and surface published Internet content.

Schema.org Structured Data Markup

The content on a website is called unstructured data because there is no formal organized structure to it that labels each part of the content in a machine readable way. Structured data on the other hand is the exact same content but organized with labels that identify images, authors, and content so that a machine can immediately understand it.

Schema.org structured data markup is generally seen by publishers and the SEO community as something to use in order to make a web page eligible for rich results features in Google. That way of thinking is manifested in the many SEO and Schema.org WordPress plugins that are limited to outputting structured data that Google may use for surfacing rich results.

New AI technologies that can use structured data are here, requiring search marketers to consider a new approach to how structured data is deployed. What Jono encouraged in the article is to think of structured data as a way to create a “data-first foundation” that is ready for the near future.

The article proposes thinking of Schema.org markup as a way to communicate what a web page is about and how it relates to everything else on the website. Jono writes:

“But don’t shy away from building a connected graph of broader, “descriptive”” schema just because Google’s not showing an immediate return. These “descriptive” types and relationships might end up being the lifeline between your content and the AI models of the future.”

Jono tweeted about his article on X (formerly Twitter) and Martha van Berkel, founder of SchemaApp, agreed with Jono’s article that the role of Schema structured data markup is shifting.

She tweeted:

“I agree with you that the role of schema markup is changing. Building a knowledge graph to manage how your website/content is understood with schema, and then asking it questions will be more important than optimizing for Rich Results or for Google.”

Ammon Johns tweeted:

“The biggest issue with Schema is that it is largely just self-declaration, no different in essence to META content, and we know how reliable Google decided that stuff was. So Google will use it, but they are unlikely to fully trust it.”

Ammon is right of course that structured data can’t be blindly trusted. One way to solve that problem is to use a smaller index of high quality websites the wa Perplexity AI does.

Gagan Ghotra tweeted how they sometimes would like to expand their use of structured data but are limited by what the SEO and structured data tools offer.

Read Jono Alderson’s X discussion here.

Read Jono’s article:

What if Schema.org is just… Labels?

Featured Image by Shutterstock/PureSolution

In today’s interconnected digital world, international SEO is no longer optional for businesses with global ambitions – it is essential.

The potential to reach diverse markets and accelerate growth through optimized online presence in different countries is significant.

But simply having a global website isn’t enough. To succeed internationally, your website must be competitive in each local market.

This guide provides an updated overview of the key considerations when embarking on an international SEO strategy.

The Difference Between International And Standard SEO

Fundamentally, SEO for a new market is the same as SEO for your home market, but unique complexities arise when expanding into global markets. These include:

• Language Variations: Each market speaks its own language – sometimes quite literally. Proper localization and cultural nuances are critical to engaging the local consumer.
• Multiple Websites: Due to legal, cultural, or engagement requirements, you may need distinct websites or sections for different countries.
• Local Search Engines: Google dominates globally, but regional search engines like Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), and Naver (South Korea) also play critical roles in certain markets.
• Local Competitors & Audience: Your local competition is just as fierce as your global competition. Understanding user preferences in each market is key to gaining traction.
• Cross-Market Competition: While you pay attention to each site, you must keep an eye on the overall performance when you have global websites. Otherwise, your local market websites may be competing against each other or, in the worst case, may not be indexed at all.

Failing to account for these differences can result in costly mistakes.

For example, your Mexico-targeted site outranks your Spain-focused site, or worse, your site does not appear in local searches at all due to technical missteps with hreflang or canonical tags.

Selecting linguistically correct phrases over a more popular phrase may result in significant missed opportunities.

Should You Go Global? Evaluating Market Opportunity

Before committing to international SEO, it’s essential to identify the right markets from not only a search demand perspective but also for ease of doing business, tariffs, and internet adoption.  Key resources to guide this decision include:

• Government and Trade Data: Websites like Trade.gov or WTO.org provide critical market and trade information.
• Global Internet Usage Reports: Leverage data from McKinsey, eMarketer, or Internet World Stats to assess online penetration and growth trends in various regions.
• Your Existing Website Analytics: Pay attention to organic traffic from foreign markets. If certain countries are already driving traffic and conversions, these should be prioritized.
• Google Search Console: It is a rich source of opportunity identification using the performance report to identify target countries especially those where Google has translated your SERP snippet and page into the local language.

By leveraging both external reports and your internal data, you can make informed decisions on where your global SEO investments will drive the most growth.

Global Strategy: One Website Or Multiple Websites?

When the market potential, business structure, or cultural nuance justifies it, separate websites for each country offer clear advantages.

These include the ability to tailor design, content, merchandising, and SEO specifically for each market.

However, building and maintaining multiple sites is resource-intensive, and not always feasible initially.

For companies testing new markets, a multilingual site using a language-only approach and hreflang tags to specify the target languages and countries is often a good starting point.

As market presence grows, the transition to country-specific websites becomes more beneficial for both SEO and user experience.

What Domain Should You Have: ccTLD Or gTLD?

A decade ago, local domains (ccTLDs) were essential for international SEO success.

Today, while they remain important, especially in markets like China or Russia, global top-level domains (gTLDs) can also be effectively optimized, reducing your management costs.

Using hreflang enables effective geotargeting, making the domain choice more flexible.

However, consider user behavior. Local ccTLDs are still often preferred in certain regions, so understanding local consumer preferences is crucial.

Note that some of the search engines, such as Baidu, still favor websites with local ccTLD.

Also, people outside the U.S. tend to click websites with local TLD over sites with .com or other generic TLDs especially of the ccTLD is used in offline advertising.

Note that if you have a multilingual or multinational site, just having a ccTLD will not make the entire site target the country to which the ccTLD is assigned.

Does Hosting Location Matter?

Historically, hosting was an additional geotargeting signal to search engines, especially when using a dot-com domain.

But even though hosting location has become less critical for geotargeting, it still impacts site performance, particularly page load times in international markets.

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help ensure fast access in and across geographies.

It is recommended that you periodically test your website simulating both mobile and location connection speeds to ensure you are providing a fast and positive experience for your visitors.

Beyond hosting, proper geotargeting techniques, such as using hreflang tags for Google and language meta tags for Bing, are essential.

In addition, tools like Google Search Console allow you to assign each website a specific geographic target, which is a key factor in search engine optimization.

How Should I Go About Alternative Geotargeting?

As site owners moved away from ccTLDs to gTLDs and local hosts to CDNs, and Google sunset its GSC geotargeting feature, strong geotargeting signals were lost, making it critical to leverage other techniques, such as using hreflang tags for Google and language meta tags for Bing.

It is also essential to ensure, where possible, to add local market nuances with language, location, and currency into the pages.

Leveraging schema markup with the business location details contributes to pages appearing more local.

Optimizing For Non-Google Search Engines

While Google is by far the most used search engine worldwide, locally grown search engines are very popular in some countries.

These search engines hold the majority of market share in key markets:

• China (Mainland, Simplified Chinese language) – Baidu.
• Russia and Eastern European Countries – Yandex.
• South Korea – Naver.

Failing to optimize for these search engines means missing out on significant opportunities in those markets.

Local search engines often require additional technical SEO work, such as governmental site verification, adherence to specific algorithms, or minimizing JavaScript to rank effectively.

Of course, even in the countries where Google is most popular, ignoring other popular search engines, including Bing, limits your business potential.

Translation And Localization: More Than Just Words

Merely translating content from your home market won’t resonate with international audiences.

Beyond accurate translation, effective localization for each country’s local audience considers cultural nuances, local consumer behavior, and regional search trends to ensure optimal user experience of the site.

Keyword research in each target country is vital. Even professionally translated content can fail to capture the actual terms that local users search for.

Keep in mind that although the translators or the translation agencies provide a correctly translated document, they may not use the same words that people use to search for the information.

Collaborating with native speakers or regionally knowledgeable agencies ensures your messaging resonates locally.

Cultural Sensitivity And Seasonal Variations

When creating multinational websites, understanding and respecting cultural sensitivities is critical to building trust and engagement with your target audience.

Each market has its own values, customs, and expectations, which must be reflected in the website’s design, content, and messaging.

For instance, colors, symbols, and images that are acceptable in one market may carry negative connotations in another.

Beyond language, elements like navigation structure, user interface preferences, mobile friendliness, and the tone of communication (formal vs. informal) should be tailored to align with local cultural expectations.

Seasonal nuances also play a significant role in multinational website content and campaigns. Countries celebrate different holidays, and even those that share similar holidays may observe them in different ways or on different dates.

Ecommerce websites, for example, need to adjust promotions, product offerings, and delivery timelines to match local holiday seasons.

Additionally, awareness of regional weather patterns, festivals, and events can help align marketing campaigns with local buying behaviors and seasonal demands, enhancing relevance and effectiveness across different markets.

Do I Need To Build Links For Each Website?

It’s a hard “Yes.” Even when you have one global site with all country or language sites under the same domain, you still want to build links to each site even when you already have lots of links pointing to your domain.

Links are critical for SEO, and each website you operate in a foreign market will need links from that market to build its own local authority.

This means building links from local and regional sites, rather than relying solely on global links to your main domain.

For example, you want to gain links from websites in India or targeting India to your Indian website. These local links help search engines recognize your website’s suitability and relevance in the target market, and will boost its competitive positioning.

What Else Should I Consider Before I Go Global?

International SEO is an ongoing investment that requires not just budget but dedicated resources.

Even multinational Fortune 100 companies frequently underestimate the need for local expertise in SEO, content creation, and technical maintenance.

No one has the luxury of having unlimited resources in each target country. This can become a major bottleneck, especially since SEO is not a “one-off” project but requires continued efforts and collaboration across multiple teams and stakeholders.

Successful international SEO strategies allocate responsibilities between headquarters and local offices, ensuring that global goals are aligned with local execution.

If you lack in-country resources, you may need to partner with external agencies specializing in SEO and localization for international markets.

How Can AI Help Global Site SEO?

While not a replacement for your SEO or localization teams, many companies are looking at AI to efficiently scale their SEO strategies, reducing manual effort while streamlining and enhancing the accuracy and relevance of their content for international markets.

AI tools can complement your team and enhance localization and translation workflows by offering initial drafts of localized content to be refined by human editors who can adjust for nuance and tone.

AI’s ability to analyze large amounts of data quickly and provide actionable insights across markets helps businesses fine-tune their SEO efforts to improve rankings and visibility in local search engines.

This can be very helpful in markets with limited resources, freeing up team members to focus on actions that require human interaction.

Conclusion: Strategic Expansion Requires Focus

A global website and international SEO are great ways to expand your market reach, but they also require extra resources and budget to ensure success.

International SEO can open significant growth opportunities, but it requires a thoughtful, precise approach.

Research markets carefully, start small if necessary, and ensure you have the resources in place to scale effectively.

By focusing on local user experience, maintaining technical SEO best practices, and building local authority, your company can achieve a strong, sustainable global presence.

More resources:

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Featured Image: ImageFlow/Shutterstock

Google has updated its crawl budget guidelines, stressing the need to maintain consistent link structures between mobile and desktop websites.

• Large websites must ensure mobile versions contain all desktop links or risk slower page discovery.
  
  
• The update mainly impacts sites with over 10,000 pages or those experiencing indexing issues.
• Link structure consistency across mobile and desktop is now a Google-recommended best practice for crawl budget optimization.

Listen, this isn’t a fun topic or article to write.

I’ve been through a lot in my career as an employee. Now, as an agency owner, I understand how economic factors, downtimes, and other ripples can have a big impact not only on budgets, but also on careers and lives.

Downtimes, downturns, and anything negative connected with the economy can mean a lot for marketers.

Whether it is due to the immediate need to scale back quickly, a lack of focus on longer-term digital marketing strategies, or the fact that it gets connected to pull-backs in broader marketing budgets, SEO is often impacted when a company encounters downtimes.

When you’re faced with shrinking budgets, having fewer resources than you need, and feeling the pressure to achieve SEO results, I have a lot of empathy.

As SEO pros, we already do a lot of work to get the dollars, software, resources, and commitment needed to achieve short-term actions that will lead to long-term performance.

My hope is that these eight steps will help you get the most out of any type of SEO downtime you might be facing and push forward.

1. Cultivate Situational Understanding

In some cases, you might be fully expecting and feeling downtime or economic circumstances. It could include global economies and have a number of different reasons for it.

In other situations, it could be something you have encountered and experienced in a specific region, industry, or vertical.

In other cases, though, downtime could be less extreme and more surprising. That doesn’t make it any better, and it means that you will need to adjust your strategy accordingly.

As an in-house SEO or digital marketer, an external consultant, or an agency professional serving clients, you need to have a situational understanding of the “what” and the “why” behind the downturn.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be an economist or policy expert.

You’ll likely be asked to do as much or more with less during a downturn.

So, before you can get deep into the “how” that you’re asked to accomplish from an SEO perspective, you need to have enough understanding of what you’re facing, the impact on your company/client, and how this reframes the organization, marketplace, and your work world overall.

2. Demand Analysis

Drilling down into the specifics and putting your SEO hat back on, the most important thing to understand is whether factors impacting budgets are tied to business and market conditions and what the impacts are on demand.

If you’re on the brand side or are in an agency or consultancy that focuses on a single industry, you likely have some ideas.

However, if SEO budgets are being reduced or cut and you have to do less with more, you need to do some analysis to understand whether demand is down overall for your product, service, or market.

Are fewer people searching? Are fewer going through the funnel or customer journey? Is there some new drop-off point that didn’t exist before?

3. Revisit Goals

Similar to demand analysis, you need to revisit goals more broadly.

Even if the market is the same, if you’re receiving less budget or fewer resources to work with, you need to reset your own expectations – and those of stakeholders.

Can you do as much as you did before with fewer dollars? Can you work with fewer internal and external resources – and still make SEO successful?

If you have to cut content, technical support, or even SEO research and strategy, even if market demand hasn’t taken a hit, you can assume that the outputs and results won’t be the same.

Revisit your goals, communicate them, and make them as objective and tied to budget and resources as possible. If you’re being asked to do more or less, that’s ok, but know that going into it!

AI is a great tool right now that can help you do more with less, so leverage it where you can in smart and quality ways.

4. Narrow Digital Footprint

I hate this tip, but it is important.

I’m typically all about more being better if it is high quality – whether that is content, features, functionality, or aspects of customer journey paths and funnels.

However, in lean times or on limited resources, you do need to limit your digital footprint.

Whether it is due to streamlining resources or your own focus and budgets, you have to scale back. If market demand is diminished, zero in on where people are still searching and have needs.

It could mean shortening your topic and keyword list to address the part of the funnel you want to be strong in or on the most profitable product or service offering.

With a narrower focus and fewer resources, you can also reduce your website resource needs.

Whether it is getting really detailed with a certain section, sub-section, subdomain, or microsite, you’re likely going to have to make some decisions and strategic and tactical choices you wouldn’t in abundant times.

You may not be able to optimize a full site, so get as narrow as you need to and focus your attention there.

5. Focus Resources

SEO is impossible to do as one person wearing all the hats unless you’re in a unicorn situation.

It requires resources like IT, web developers, UX, content writers, brand strategists, legal/compliance, and/or management approvals.

And I might be missing something from the above list!

Back in the day, when I started doing SEO in the mid-2000s, I was able to do about 80% by myself. Now, for good reasons, much more collaboration is necessary.

However, when budgets get reduced, you have to be very focused on where the remaining money goes.

In some cases, you might have that dictated to you. However, if you still have enough control, you’re going to have to prioritize where you put the budget and deploy resources.

That means possibly prioritizing content over technical updates. Or technical over UX. Or CRO over link building.

Be smart, utilize your updated strategy and goals, and deploy your resources in ways that don’t stretch you too thin.

6. Target Short-Term Wins

What can be gained in the short term? Your market conditions, goals, and the ultimate extent of how restrictive budgets are will help you dictate this.

Are you down to just a few dollars? Put it on the highest opportunity and priority items.

I know that sounds obvious, but SEO is big and complex. We’re prone to go down rabbit trails.

There are a lot of distractions. Stay disciplined, know what you need to do and achieve in the short term, and do your best to forget about the long-term items.

If you’re trying to keep the lights on, achieve ROI in the short term, and get through this season to see budgets increase again, go for things that have the best chance of short-term success.

That could mean local SEO, partnerships/affiliations with content, going bottom of the funnel in the keyword and content focus, or full SEO scope/scale but on a very short list of topics/terms.

7. Think Long-Term

If you have the luxury of thinking about long-term strategy, or more likely, are hit by decreased demand but still have some SEO budget, then you can do things that will build for the future.

With a long-term focus and strategy, you can get ahead of competitors who are cutting budgets entirely or are focused on short-term thinking even if there’s no demand there.

I can speak from experience with clients in past downturns who we collaborated with even when their demand slowed down, choosing to invest in building longer-term plays that put them on top when demand picked back up.

Things to invest in if you have some budget, even when you don’t have the demand and want to be future thinking: website tech, infrastructure, the base of content, your thought leadership platform, and how you serve the full funnel as the authority in your industry.

If demand is down short term, I’m willing to bet that your competitors are taking their foot off the gas, giving you an opening to pass them and come out stronger on the other side – if you’re not already in the top position across your key focus topics and terms.

8. Measure Efforts

Never stop measuring what is happening. You want to have your own set of performance data to objectify everything you can.

That means being able to draw correlations where you can between reductions in budgets, markets, and other resources and performance.

It will allow you to continue (or start) knowing the true impact of downturns, reductions in investment, and market factors on your SEO efforts now. It will also give you benchmark data for the future.

If you have past data from downturns or budget reductions, use that as guidance, too!

Don’t do anything without projections, expectations, and measurements.

Whether you’re in a publicly traded company or a small business, data is an objective that removes as much gray area as possible.

Conclusion

While businesses might take similar approaches to downtimes, no two situations are the same.

Whether you’re given a reduced budget, team, or set of resources overall, you can still push forward toward SEO goals and success.

I’m not saying this is a fun season, but I want to encourage you that if you understand the situation, recalibrate to the demand and achievable goals, and push forward with a narrowed focus and an achievable plan, you can see things through to the other side.

Sometimes, lean times lead to a better understanding of what is working and what isn’t.

Yes, measurement, analytics, and proper attribution are a big part of SEO. However, until pressed, we often overlook inefficiencies and wasted resources and efforts in less stressful times.

I encourage you to press forward in downtimes. These can be big growth opportunities for you professionally, personally, and for your organization as you persevere and surpass those who don’t have a plan or commitment to the longer-term aspect of SEO.

More resources: 

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Featured Image: fotogestoeber/Shutterstock

Lawyers for Matt Mullenweg and Automattic filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit from WP Engine, offering a different perspective on the dispute’s underlying causes.

The motion to dismiss claims that the one causing harm isn’t Mullenweg and Automattic but WP Engine, asserting that WP Engine is compelling the defendant to provide resources and support free of charge as well as to restrict the Mullenweg’s ability to express his opinions about WP Engine’s practices.

The motion to dismiss begins by accuses WP Engine of selectively choosing recent events as basis for their complaint. It then fills in the parts that were left out, beginning with the founding of WordPress over two decades ago when Matt co-founded a way to create websites that democratized Internet publishing in the process. The motion outlines how his organization devoted thousands of person-years to growing the platform, eventually getting it to a point where it now generates an estimated $10 billion dollars per year for thousands of companies and freelancers.

The point of the first part of the motion is to explain that Mullenweg and Automattic support the open source WordPress project because the project depends on a “symbiotic” relationship between the WordPress community and those who are a part of it, including web hosts like WP Engine.

“But the success and vitality of WordPress depends on a supportive and symbiotic relationship with those in the WordPress community.”

After establishing what the community is, how it was founded and the role of Mullenweg and Automattic as a strongly supportive of the community, it then paints a picture of WP Engine as a company that reaps huge benefits from the volunteer work and donated time without adequately giving back to the community. This is the part that Mullenweg and Automattic feel is left out of WP Engine’s complaint, that Mullenweg was expressing his opinion that not only should WP Engine should provide more support to the community and that Mullenweg was responding to the threat posed by the plaintiff’s behavior.

The motion explains:

“Plaintiff WP Engine’s conduct poses a threat to that community. WP Engine is a website hosting service built on the back of WordPress software and controlled by the private equity firm Silver Lake, which claims over $100B of assets under management.

…In addition to WordPress software, WP Engine also uses various of the free resources on the Website, and its Complaint alleges that access to the Website is now, apparently, critical for its business.”

Lastly, the beginning part of the motion, which explains the defendant’s side of the dispute, asserts that the defendant’s behavior was entirely within their legal right because no agreement exists between WordPress and WP Engine that guarantees them access to WordPress resources and that WP Engine at no time tried to secure rights to access.

The document continues:

“But the Complaint does not (and cannot) allege that WP Engine has any agreement with Matt (or anyone else for that matter) that gives WP Engine the right to use the Website’s resources. The Complaint does not (and cannot) allege that WP Engine at any time has attempted to secure that right from Matt or elsewhere.

Instead, WP Engine has exploited the free resources provided by the Website to make hundreds of millions of dollars annually. WP Engine has done so while refusing to meaningfully give back to the WordPress community, and while unfairly trading off the goodwill associated with the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.”

Accusation Of Trademark Infringement

The motion to dismiss filed by Mullenweg and Automattic accuse WP Engine of trademark infringement, a claim that has been at the heart of of Mullenweg’s dispute, which the legal response says is a dispute that Mullenweg attempted to amicably resolve in private.

The legal document asserts:

“In 2021, for the first time, WP Engine incorporated the WordPress trademark into the name of its own product offering which it called “Headless WordPress,” infringing that trademark and violating the express terms of the WordPress Foundation Trademark Policy, which prohibits the use of the WordPress trademarks in product names. And, over time, WP Engine has progressively increased its use and prominence of the WordPress trademark throughout its marketing materials, ultimately using that mark well beyond the recognized limits of nominative fair use.”

What Triggered The Dispute

The defendants claim that WP Engine benefited from the open source community but declined to become an active partner in the open source community. The defendants claim that they tried to bring WP Engine into the community as part of the symbiotic relationship but WP Engine refused.

The motion to dismiss is interesting because it first argues that WP Engine didn’t have an agreement with Automattic for use of the WordPress trademark nor did it had an agreement for the rights to have access to WordPress resources. Then it shows how the defendants tried to reach an agreement and that it was WP Engine’s refusal to “meaningfully give back to the WordPress community” and come to an agreement with Automattic is what triggered the dispute.

The document explains:

“Matt has attempted to raise these concerns with WP Engine and to reach an amicable resolution for the good of the community. In private, Matt also has encouraged WP Engine to give back to the ecosystem from which it has taken so much. Preserving and maintaining the resources made available on the Website requires considerable effort and investment—an effort and investment that Matt makes to benefit those with a shared sense of mission. WP Engine does not
embrace that mission.

WP Engine and Silver Lake cannot expect to profit off the back of others without carrying some of the weight—and that is all Matt has asked of them. For example, Matt suggested that WP Engine either execute a license for the Foundation’s WordPress trademarks or dedicate eight percent of its revenue to the further development of the open source WordPress software.”

Mullenweg Had Two Choices

The above is what Mullenweg and Automattic claim is at the heart of the dispute, the unwillingness of WP Engine to reach an agreement with Automattic and become a stronger partner with the community. The motion to dismiss say that WP Engine’s refusal to reach an agreement left Mullenweg few choices of what to do next, as the motion explains:.

“When it became abundantly clear to Matt that WP Engine had no interest in giving back, Matt was left with two choices: (i) continue to allow WP Engine to unfairly exploit the free resources of the Website, use the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks without authorization, which would also threaten the very existence of those trademarks, and remain silent on the negative impact of its behavior or (ii) refuse to allow WP Engine to do that and demand publicly that WP Engine do more to support the community.”

Disputes Look Different From Each Side

Matt Mullenweg and Automattic have been portrayed in an unflattering light since the dispute with WP Engine burst into public. The motion to dismiss communicates that Mullenweg’s motivations were in defense of the WordPress community, proving that every dispute looks different depending on who is telling the story. Now it’s up to the judge to decide.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/santypan

YouTube announced an expansion of its AI-generated video summaries feature alongside several platform updates.

AI Summary Expansion

AI-generated summaries, previously tested on select English-language videos, will now reach a broader global audience.

According to YouTube’s official announcement:

“These video summaries use generative AI to create a short basic summary of a YouTube video which provides viewers with a quick glimpse of what to expect.”

The company emphasized that these AI summaries “do not replace or impact a Creator’s ability to write their own video descriptions” but serve as complementary content to help viewers find relevant information more efficiently.

Studio Mobile

YouTube announced a restructured content management system for creators.

The revamped Studio mobile interface organizes content by format-specific shelves, including videos, Shorts, livestreams, and playlists.

Notable changes include:

• A new list view option for each content format
• Simplified visibility of monetization status
• Scheduled content filter that appears only when relevant

Community Engagement Updates

YouTube is rolling out changes to its community engagement tools.

The former “comments” tab is being rebranded as “Community” and will feature enhanced audience metrics and moderation capabilities.

Notable additions include a community spotlight feature highlighting engaged viewers and AI-powered comment reply suggestions.

YouTube notes this feature “will be limited to a small number of creators while we test the feature.”

Creator Support Chatbot

YouTube is testing an AI-powered support chatbot on Studio desktop.

The feature appears as a clickable icon next to the search field, though currently limited to eligible creators during the testing phase.

Availability

According to the announcement, these features will be rolled out gradually “over the coming weeks and months.”

YouTube requests feedback from creators and viewers as the new features become available, particularly regarding the AI-generated summaries.

See the full announcement below:

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Featured Image: Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock

This post was sponsored by Kinsta. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Managing client sites can quickly become costly in terms of time, money, and expertise, especially as your agency grows.

You’re constantly busy fixing slow WordPress performance, handling downtime, or regularly updating and backing up ecommerce sites and small blogs.

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WordPress Worries & How To Keep Clients Happy

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Basics Of Managed Hosting For WordPress

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Key Benefits Of Efficient Managed Hosting For SEO

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Importance Of An Agency-Focused Managed WordPress Hosting Provider

For SEO agencies, uptime guarantees are essential to maintaining site availability. Managed hosting providers, like Kinsta, who specialize in serving agencies, offer a 99.9% uptime SLA and multiple data center locations, ensuring that websites remain accessible to users across the globe.

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Kinsta. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Images by Kinsta. Used with permission.

Google published a proposal in the Schema.org Project GitHub instance for updating Schema.org to add more detailed shipping information so that customers can get more detailed information that will likely show up in new Google Search rich results as well as in other systems. The proposal also suggests adding a sitewide Organization structured data so that merchants can present redundant structured data related to shipping in one location.

Shipping Schema.org Structured Data

The proposed new structured data Type can be used by merchants to provide more shipping details. It also suggests adding the flexibility of using a sitewide shipping structured data that can then be nested with the Organization structured data, thereby avoiding having to repeat the same information thousands of times across a website.

The initial proposal states:

“This is a proposal from Google to support a richer representation of shipping details (such as delivery cost and speed) and make this kind of data explicit. If adopted by schema.org and publishers, we consider it likely that search experiences and other consuming systems could be improved by making use of such markup.

This change introduces a new type, ShippingService, that groups shipping constraints (delivery locations, time, weight and size limits and shipping rate). Redundant fields from ShippingRateSettings are therefore been deprecated in this proposal.

As a consequence, the following changes are also proposed:

some fields in OfferShippingDetails have moved to ShippingService;
ShippingRateSettings has more ways to specify the shipping rate, proportional to the order price or shipping weight;
linking from the Offer should now be done with standard Semantic Web URI linking.”

The proposal is open for discussion and many stakeholders are offering opinions on how the updated and new structured data would work.

For example, one person involved in the discussion asked how a sitewide structured data type placed in the Organization level could be superseded by individual products had different information and someone else provided an answer.

A participant in the GitHub discussion named Tiggerito posted:

“I re-read the document and what you said makes sense. The Organization is a place where shared ShippingConditions can be stored. But the ShippingDetails is always at the ProductGroup or Product level.

This is how I currently deal with Shipping Details:

In the back end the owner can define a global set of shipping details. Each contains the fields Google currently support, like location and times, but not specifics about dimensions. Each entry also has conditions for what product the entry can apply to. This can include a price range and a weight range.

When I’m generating the structured data for a page I include the entries where the product matches the conditions.

This change looks like it will let me change from filtering out the conditions on the server, to including them in the Structured Data on the product page.

Then the consumers of the data can calculate which ShippingConditions are a match and therefore what rates are available when ordering a specific number of the product. Currently, you can only provide prices for shipping one.

The split also means it’s easier to provide product specific information as well as shared shipping information without the need for repetition.

Your example in the document at the end for using Organization. It looks like you are referencing ShippingConditions for a product that are on a shipping page. This cross-referencing between pages could greatly reduce the bloat this has on the product page, if supported by Google.”

The Googler responded to Tiggerito:

“@Tiggerito

The Organization is a place where shared ShippingConditions can be stored. But the ShippingDetails is always at the ProductGroup or Product level.

Indeed, and this is already the case. This change also separates the two meanings of eg. width, height, weight as description of the product (in ShippingDetails) and as constraints in the ShippingConditions where they can be expressed as a range (QuantitativeValue has min and max).

In the back end the owner can define a global set of shipping details. Each contains the fields Google currently support, like location and times, but not specifics about dimensions. Each entry also has conditions for what product the entry can apply to. This can include a price range and a weight range.

When I’m generating the structured data for a page I include the entries where the product matches the conditions.

This change looks like it will let me change from filtering out the conditions on the server, to including them in the Structured Data on the product page.

Then the consumers of the data can calculate which ShippingConditions are a match and therefore what rates are available when ordering a specific number of the product. Currently, you can only provide prices for shipping one.

Some shipping constraints are not available at the time the product is listed or even rendered on a page (eg. shipping destination, number of items, wanted delivery speed or customer tier if the user is not logged in). The ShippingDetails attached to a product should contain information about the product itself only, the rest gets moved to the new ShippingConditions in this proposal.
Note that schema.org does not specify a cardinality, so that we could specify multiple ShippingConditions links so that the appropriate one gets selected at the consumer side.

The split also means it’s easier to provide product specific information as well as shared shipping information without the need for repetition.

Your example in the document at the end for using Organization. It looks like you are referencing ShippingConditions for a product that are on a shipping page. This cross-referencing between pages could greatly reduce the bloat this has on the product page, if supported by Google.

Indeed. This is where we are trying to get at.”

Discussion On LinkedIn

LinkedIn member Irina Tuduce (LinkedIn profile), software engineer at Google Shopping, initiated a discussion that received multiple responses that demonstrating interest for the proposal.

Andrea Volpini (LinkedIn profile), CEO and Co-founder of WordLift, expressed his enthusiasm for the proposal in his response:

“Like this Irina Tuduce it would streamline the modeling of delivery speed, locations, and cost for large organizations

Indeed. This is where we are trying to get at.”

Another member, Ilana Davis (LinkedIn profile), developer of the JSON-LD for SEO Shopify App, posted:

“I already gave my feedback on the naming conventions to schema.org which they implemented. My concern for Google is how exactly merchants will get this data into the markup. It’s nearly impossible to get exact shipping rates in the SD if they fluctuate. Merchants can enter a flat rate that is approximate, but they often wonder if that’s acceptable. Are there consequences to them if the shipping rates are an approximation (e.g. a price mismatch in GMC disapproves a product)?”

Inside Look At Development Of New Structured Data

The ongoing LinkedIn discussion offers a peek at how stakeholders in the new structured data feel about the proposal. The official Schema.org GitHub discussion not only provides a view of  how the proposal is progressing, it offers stakeholders an opportunity to provide feedback for shaping what it will ultimately look like.

There is also a public Google Doc titled, Shipping Details Schema Change Proposal, that has a full description of the proposal.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Stokkete

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

• Identify Patterns:
  A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
• Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
  The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
• Shorter References Use Less Bits:
  The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

• Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
• Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
• Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
• In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
• When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
• Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
• Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc