Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, Add your email as a manager to all clients accounts. That way you will be able to see all the accounts listed under your email when you log into your GMB. Thanks

Test it. No-follow a portion of the links (if you have designed hundreds of sites, maybe try 10%). See if your results go up, stay the same or go down. If your results go down, remove the no-follow tags again. Even if the results don't instantly come back (and Google keeps the no-follow reference, even when the coding is removed) you won't have lost much as you kept your sample small SEMRush and Moz Toxicity ratings rely a little too much on linguistic, 'semantic' relevance (e.g: "a link from a car manufacturer to a car insurance site is relevant as they're both about cars"). Deeper relevance (that which Google is actually looking for) is more to do with "why is it relevant for the user to click on this link?" Toxicity scores may simply be a reflection that you have loads of links from sites which are 'thematically' irrelevant. But that doesn't necessarily make the links themselves irrelevant! It may well be useful for people to Google the sites you made, think they are cool and wonder who designed them The truth is neither SEMRush nor Moz knows exactly what Google thinks a good / bad link is. They basically look for patterns in backlink profiles and linking sites, which have been involved in penalties which did occur on Google (which they know from their keyword / ranking indexation data). If suddenly 2-3 sites drop out of the rankings and they all shared similar backlinks, SEMRush and Moz can estimate that those linking sites (under certain circumstances) may be bad But it's not a 100% guarantee, indeed if you disavow or no-follow loads of links based on these ratings alone - you often do see little performance dips (without doing more forensic, more holistic research) If your main concern is that 'site-wide linking' may be negatively affecting you, there could be a simple cure for that. Your idea of producing case studies on your own site is great, but it stops you getting free traffic and leads from sites that you designed - if  those sites stop helping you rank well, or stop linking to you Instead you could create new pages on the clients sites. Yeah seems crazy but hear me out as I have some logic behind this which might create a good compromise, which would be very interesting to test In the footer on your client's sites, leave a link saying "Webdesign by Conversal". When users click that link, instead of taking them directly to your own site, you could point that link to a page on the client's site with some design sketches, a bit of blurb about how your approached the project. THAT page (on your client's site) could then link to you directly. In this way, you'd only get ONE link from each site, but the footer link would remain (though it would become an internal link) and continue to serve you. Maybe this could be a decent solution, but I've never tested it (sorry) The links from these pages on your client's sites (accessible only from the footer links) could connect with the case study URLs on your own site, creating a unified experience which leads people down a funnel - to buying a site design from you I might try that on a few sample clients, monitor the results. If the results didn't drop I'd at least feel better insulated against Penguin, and would probably then roll out another batch

Hi, Are you using any kind of filters in Analytics, for example, exclude bots, exclude queries and pages anything like this?

Hi There, First Question: There are robots.txt files in these locations, however both don't reference a disallow for this page so this isn't the issue: https://www.brody.be/nl/robots.txt https://www.brody.be/robots.txt I would use the new version of Google Search Console and use the URL inspection tool. This will let you know why the URL is being excluded and give you the option to manually submit it if everything is ok with it. Second Question Google can be a bit funny about meta descriptions, especially ones that contain emoji characters like the ticks you are showing within the Yoast meta description field. Sometimes if it deems the meta description irrelevant, it can rewrite it itself. If this has been changed recently, I would give it a bit more time to refresh and see what happens. I hope that helps! Kind regards, Sean

The thing about this website game regardless of it's intent and mechanism of monetization you have to be capable of not looking at things in terms of time and deadlines, goals. You plant a seed the seed will grow. If you don't water it, it will die. Unfortunately, unlike trees, you can't guarantee nor approximate  when and how much fruit it's going to bring in for your harvest if you ever even get that far. One day, one step at a time, what is it you can do today, to improve the size, and quality of your site. Do the same thing the next day. There is no "My website is complete" It is a certainty the better quality content and design, the better quality and visit times/quantities will be for you. The more content and pages, the more possibilities and reasons for visitors to appear. Until you have 20 really solid amazing pieces of content on your site, don't stray or go link building. Because what will be the point? The first time it occurs if you take everyone here's advice it will most likely be MUCH quicker than it took me, because I resisted making content as long as humanely possible like an idiot but this occurence is amazing! You'll eventually produce something Google thinks is godly. That content could literally be relevant amongst some ridiculously tough key phase, it will just seemingly skyrocket to the first page like it belonged there from the beginning of time and was nailed firmly in place! It's crazy encountering it because you see so often the times in which Google is letting the most ridiculous events occur and make no sense of it. But then their algorithm will unexpectedly do something brilliant, genuinely rewarding you for your hard work! Don't get used to it!  It is rare! but it happens

Hi Nigel, The website https://www.residentiebosrand.be/ is supposed to be ranking on 'residentie bosrand'. I know authority plays a big part in ranking on keywords. But other sites which are not as relevant as this one rank higher. Do we just have to wait for the website to rank on this keyword?

As far as I know how Yoast can create the sitemaps it's just a dump of all the articles that you have in WordPress. So your use case wouldn't be solved with just installing the plugin. You would probably have to work with either what you have or put some effort into rewriting how there sitemaps are being generated.

Hi Gianluca! Thanks for the answer. I see that these images and attachments keep showing in Google. Is this hurting our ranking score? Will we have to redirect ALL of them to the home page? Or is it ok for us to wait and let Google recrawl the website and remove them from the index?

Hi conversal, Did you see the responses to your question? Just want to make sure - let us know how things are going, thanks! Christy

Hi all, If you are trying to target two different locations then try to personalise the content for each location. Maybe stats on which phone model is most popular in each place. If the sub domains will be exact copies, then rel=canonical one to the other. thanks

Hello, I agree with Agencia SEO, The 301 redirect should help take care of the problem. It does take a little time for it to kick in, but it will help with all the search engines and not just Google. Best Regards

For Google are different pages so if you dont have cannonical tags or redirections, can create a duplicated content Issues. No is not normal, maybe you need to check the settings of your website.

Hello, Thanks for your reaction. The url's of both snippets are the same (https://www). Since these are the same url's there is no canonical url. We have recently changed the meta description, so a recrawl does look like the best option.

Hi, After 2 months my question still stands. in Google Webmaster Tools the amount of indexed pages is already down to 0. However, the pages keep showing up after 2 months when using the "site:www." search. Is this normal? Hope you can help.

Hi Jeroen, I'd be very careful about placing sitewide links on all your client sites that point back to you site. This could easily end up hurting you. Here's an example where WPMU.org was hit because they were doing something similar - http://moz.com/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update. I think the best thing for you to do is add a "nofollow" tag to all the links from your clients' sites that point to your site. This should help protect you and then moving your site over to Server A won't be a problem either. Hope this helps. Tim

Anybody another idea what could be the problem here please?

Hi, you need to fix this by using the rel="canonical" in the Head section of pages so that where there are duplicates they all point to one of them as the original. You can see more information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en In Joomla and other Content Management Systems, duplicate pages can sometimes be an issue because of the way search engine friendly URLs are created. With these systems you can generally find an extension / plugin to help resolve the issue. For Joomla there doesn't seems to be much on offer in their Extensions Directory, but you can see them here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization- I hope that helps, Peter

Will check this, Thanks!

Thanks a lot for this usefull info, it helped me understand this better.

Hello there! Like Wesley mentioned before the best way to avoid any "non-desired" crawling and indexing of your development or testing environment is by requiring authentication (whether with htaccess or your own programmed login/password screen). Unfortunately sometimes there have been situations when search crawlers don't necessarily follow robots.txt directives. Additionally, beyond search engines you might want to protect your development or testing environment, making sure that only people with the required access to it can enter. Because of this, the best way to go is requiring authentication to access to your subdomains, not robots.txt. I hope this help!