GTServices

You can add them manually as you would normally (via backend). (just leave the 'Show Groups in Registration' setting disabled)

4.5x file uploaded ... just waiting for approval

This is HUGE. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!!

It's done but I won't make it available today as planned. It will be available end of week (March 20). This will allow me time to test the app.

My goal is to get it up this weekend.

Thank you for reporting. I'll get this fixed. Plus, I need to upgrade to 4.5. 😉 I believe this is what you are looking for... the tabbed UI are groups ... it will fetch members based on the active tab

Starting a successful forum these days is not easy. But, it is doable when site has a focus (niche). 1. Create CONTENT. You need content to keep readers coming back for more. Create different types of CONTENT to grab different kinds of people. Here are some ideas... Discussions FAQs Images (eg. to share, download, create a story, etc) Articles News etc 2. Differentiate your site from your competition. First impression is important. 3. Invite people via social, email, word-of-mouth, etc. 4. (Onboarding) Create a helpful "Welcome Email Message" for new members. You can use this opportunity to help them take action (make a post), to inform, etc. 5. Stay active on your site and with members.

The "email confirmation link" is ?do=validate and redirects to main page (root domain). The actual registration process is... (register page)/ - landing page (register page)/?do=validating - landing page after submission

The issue here is that Google will still go to those pages crawl and at some point index. This process takes away from indexing more important pages in a timely manner. (They will continue to revisit the page; Otherwise, comments would be ignored.) This affects people with lots of pages especially if you just migrated to a new system or rebuild your sitemap. You want to help Google as much as you can. It benefits you the most. (I removed my previous comment that was here as I believe it will just confuse more than help) The goal is to get Google to index/rank your quality pages faster asap.

Good advice @Durango but admins need to pay attention to their Sitemap settings as well. Personally, I prefer not to NOINDEX all profiles. I think SOME member pages should get indexed. For example, I see that some writers, experts, and staff pages bring in good organic traffic. Plus, we are trying to build a "community". Not just a content site. A community is about it's members.

Be cautious when NOINDEXing topics in masses. If you made a mistake NOINDEXing a topic that has been indexed for years, it may take a while for Google to reindex (1 to several months). What's worse is that you may end up with a lower rank. You are forcing Google to recrawl/reindex the page. Older topics will get hit the hardest. With that said, there are some pages you can safely NOINDEX. I would start with Profile pages. They suck up your crawl rate. NOINDEX inactive accounts and maybe accounts that have 10 or less posts. You can already do this with IPS. If you have RSS generated pages, you may want to consider removing them as well. These are just copied content from external sites. Not useful in terms of Organic Search unless they have lots of comments. Manually review any that have lots of comments. A great way to do this is to review your Analytics > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search > Landing Page data. Check how much traffic a page has been bringing in the past 7, 30, and 180 days. You may be surprised to find out that some "thin content" pages are actually bringing in traffic. Compare the numbers with other pages on your site. IMPORTANT: Make sure you are comparing the right numbers. Organic Search is all about USERS not Pageviews. NOTE: Most sites really don't have an issue with crawl rate. For sites that migrated to IPS (ie. vbulletin to IPS) the biggest issue occurs with change in URLs. This affects topics, images, and profiles. The bigger your site the longer it will take to climb back up. Many site owners don't realize how much traffic Image Search brings in until it's too late. If I remember correctly, IPS doesn't offer any redirects for attachments/images with migration. They only offer redirects for topics/forums. However, if forum URLs lack forum ids* (which some vbulletin SEO tools offered) than this is something that IPS doesn't offer out of the box. You will need custom code for this. * domain.com/forum-name/ Before you mass NOINDEXing, I recommend the following... Check URLs in Analytics that may be affected. DO NOT NOINDEX BLINDLY. If you NOINDEX 5,000 topics that generated an avg 10 USERS per week. Than you are looking at 50,000 USERS lost for the week. Let's say your site has an avg 1.5 Pages/Session. That's equivalent to 75,000 pageviews lost for the week. Have ads on the site? The avg is 3 ad slots per page. That's 225,000 impressions lost for the week. 1 million impressions lost for the month

I'll see what I can do for the next update.

Most ad partners will just approve your domains across the board (unless one is against TOS). I haven't run into any issues with ad partners approving domains and I've been doing this for a long time. For the most part, you will use key-values to target specific forums/pages on your site. This is usually associated with Direct Sales. eg. someone wants to target your ABC, MNO, and XYZ forums on your site. Key-values allows you to do just that. Placements are not required.

I'm sorry. I missed this. You can target via key-values. eg. url = domain.com eg. url = /this-is-a-specific-page/ eg. page = "This is a specific page title" Yes, I use sizeMapping.

@AlexWebsites In the beginning, it was best to keep them separate but we no longer have to do that. The tools available to us today helps us to keep things simple. We just have 1 set of ad units for all sites. Today, it's simple to do reports based URLs (sites), key-values (ie. URLs, Page, Usergroup...), etc. TIPS: If you have AdX and Adsense, make sure AdX is set to "Default for Dynamic Allocation" (Admin > Linked Accounts) (Just make sure because some accounts that had Adsense approved before AdX may have Adsense set to Dynamic Allocation. If this happens to you, you could be losing a lot of money.) A key-value can be a url, usergroup, page, etc. It can be anything that you want to target. For example, you want to target a specific usergroup with a campaign. Or, maybe you want to target a group of members based on a custom Profile Fields. (This is very handy when a specific customer wants to target a specific group of people on your site.) Keep your naming convention simple for ad units, rules, etc. For ad units, I use the standards when naming my units: ros_leaderboard ros_medrec ros_largerec ros_skyscraper ros_halfpage ros_banner ros_mobile ros_sticky etc If you require 2 leaderboard ad units on the page, I recommend being specific on the 2nd. For example, name it post_leaderboard ... for another medrec found below the fold, name it bot_medrec, etc. You can use the same naming convention for Price Rules. Naming is very important. You look at the name and it tells you everything you need to know. (Keep in mind that your site design may change frequently but you shouldn't do the same with ad units.) Create Price Rules per ad units. Learn everything you can about price rules. Use Header Bidding and Adsense (alongside your Ad Manager setup) to put pressure on the auction