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Understood my friend. By propagation, I meant the propagation of the sitemap.xml file for newly added preferred-version of the site and yes, you are absolutely correct. It takes a while for Google to get the stats for the preferred version. Yes, I knew you would be having a 301 in place already, I mentioned about it just in case

Wish you good luck for all your endeavors.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

You just need to add the sitemap for the preferred version and refresh the page. All your sitemap info will be readily available. Here we don't need to bother about it propagating or anything of that sort. As the sitemap.xml is still there where it was (in the root folder), nothing has changed for Google.

If you have not done this already, you should go in for a 301 permanent redirection from your non-preferred of your site to your preferred-version.

Good to hear that my friend. Please do not delete the newly added non-www version of your website as you will not be able to set the preferred domain without it. Just leave it as it is.

You can access your preferred domain by clicking on it to get all the stats in GWMT account.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Vadim,

Yes you need to get both the non-www and www versions of your website verified in GWMT account to be able to set the preferred domain. Its as simple as adding your site without www to the account and hit the Verify this site option. That's it. As you would have your www version already verified, getting the non-www version of your website doesnot require to go through the verification process like uploading the html file or adding the verification meta tag.

Just add your site without www by clicking the ADD A SITE button and click the Verify this site option and you should be good.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

You are most welcome my friend. Improving the stickiness, as you said is a bit hard but if we can make it happen, then nothing like it. Let me share a personal experience here. Few years back, I had a client with an e-commerce site. The avg. time spent on the site was around 1 min and few seconds (sorry do not remember exactly). He wanted to improve it. When I saw the product pages, for example, a page related to a coffee making machine, the page had nothing but only the product image, description, features and a button to place an order. We then took some good videos of the product from Youtube and embedded them on to the page. We also added some related products to the right hand side of the page. We did this to all the product pages of the site and the results were very dramatic. The avg. site engagement times jumped to over 3 mins. Then we also had few clients whom we got gamification implemented on the site, small flash games related to the niche and this also got them amazing results. Site engagement time as you know is very important and Google knows who is sticking around and who is leaving once they click through the search results pages and land on a site.

Coming to your blog, I really enjoyed reading it and I would continue visiting it.

Good luck to you my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

No problem Ruchi and thanks for the info. Its time to educate the clients

Broad match search volume numbers can be very, very misleading and the client should know about what broad match is all about and how it cannot help them, of course we need to first ask them what is that they want to do with those numbers. Good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Shabbir,

Without digging deeper, I would like to say that your website is relatively new and please have a look at your competitors' websites and the time they have been online. You can use archive.org for the purpose. New websites can take time to gain the traction and 6 months is very little that too when you say, its an e-commerce website hence, cut throat competition. Its good that you have been getting 100 -120 organic visits per day. If you continue the way you have been doing, you should be in a good shape soon.

As you know, content that is unique, highly relevant, useful to the visitor and serves the purpose of their visit will do the magic for you. Please don't worry about websites that use low quality or scrapped content ranking at the top. Its not going to work for long (but can greatly depends on the kind of authority they have like DA and PA). In general, search engines have higher tolerance levels for highly authoritative websites.

I would like to conclude by saying, please do not worry as your website is very young and concentrate your efforts to improve the quality of your content, you can try to include some small videos and images (on the product pages) related to the products' functionality, features, USPs etc..improve the stickiness of your website (make your visitors hang out for reasonable amount of time on your site), earn links rather than building them desperately (I am sure, you will never do this as I read your blog). Try to build citations to your site from good websites and you know the rest.

All the best to you.

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ruchi,

Google keyword planner now has only exact match and currently there is no way to extract broad match search volume using GKP. If budget is not a constraint, you can run a PPC campaign with broad match keywords and check out the volumes for your desired geo-location. By the way, if you can let us know what is that you want to do with the broad match search volume, we will be able to comment better.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. Once the redirection is in place, please double check that its indeed a 301 and nothing else. You can use any of the HTTP header status checker available online like web-sniffer.net or Screamingfrog.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ramesh,

Thanks for the info and here is the problem.

This URL, http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/booklet-design is pointing to the following URL:

http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/annual-report-design

The HTTP header status code is still a 200. This is the issue.

To fix this, you need to redirect the URL, http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/booklet-design

via a 301 permanent redirection. A 301 redirection gives an HTTP header status 301 and this tells the search engines that the old URL is no more in force and has been replaced by the new one.

Best of luck my friend.

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ramesh,

I checked the URL you gave, http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/annual-report-design for missing page title but could not find any issues in there. I used Screamingfrog and others. The page came out with out any issue. I looked at the cache date and it showed 29th August. You can try Fetch as Google in WMT account and then click on Submit to Index.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi SK,

Have a flight to catch soon and thought of quickly pointing you here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi

If you want to noindex any of your pages, there is no way that Google or any other search engines will think something is fishy. Its up to the webmaster to decide what and what not to get indexed from his website. If you implement page level noindex, the link juice will still flow to the page but if you also have nofollow along with noindex, the link juice will flow to the page but will be contained on the page itself and will not be passed on the links that flow out of that page.

I conclude by saying, there is nothing wrong in making the pages non-indexable.

Here is an interesting discussion related to this on Moz:

http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

If you wish not to show these pages even to the front end user, you can just block them using the page level robots meta tag so that these pages will never be indexed by the search engines as well.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, it is a very good idea to block any and all the pages that do not provide any useful content to the visitors and especially when they are very thin content wise. So the idea is to keep away low quality content that does no good to the visitor, from the Internet. Search engines would love every webmaster doing so.

However, sometimes, no matter how thin the content is on some pages, they still provide good information to the visitors and serve the purpose of the visit. In this case, you can provide contextual links to those pages and add the nofollow attribute to the link. Of course you should ideally be implementing the page level blocking using the robots meta tag on those pages. I do not think you should return a 404 on these pages as there is no need to do so. When a page level blocking is implemented, Google will not index the blocked content even if it finds a third party reference to it from elsewhere on the Internet.

If you have implemented the page level noindex using the robots meta tag, there is no need to go for a sitemap with these URLs. With noindex in place, as I mentioned above, Google will not index the content even if it discovers the page using a reference from anywhere on the Internet.

Hope it helps my friend.Best,Devanur Rafi

Hi Chris, I second Jarno's opinion in this regard. If it is going to be a huge overhead to add the page level blocking, you can rely on your current robots.txt setup. There is a small catch here though. Even if you block using robots.txt file, if Google finds a reference to the blocked content elsewhere on the Internet, then it would index the blocked content. In situations like this, page level content blocking is the way forward. So to fully restrict Google bot indexing your content, you should ideally be using the page level robots meta tag or x-robots-tag.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Agree with Chris. You need to wait for 3 to 4 weeks. I would suggest you not to make any changes in the meanwhile. Wait and watch for the things to settle. If you do not see any improvement, you can get in to digging what actually went wrong and other SEO forensics.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Excellent my friend. You are heading the right direction. Though Google says, to keep the old domain live for at least 180 days, I would recommend to keep it live for at least 9 months i.e.270 days. Hope you might have seen these articles from Google, I would like to mention it here just in case you need it:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en

and

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

Best,

Devanur Rafi

You can add the new website to your existing Google webmaster tools account, get it verified and then set the geo-target to the desired country.

Here is how you do it exactly: Taken from, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.

2. Click the gear icon , and then click Site Settings.

3. In the Geographic target section, select the option you want.

   If you want to ensure that your site is not associated with any country or region, select Unlisted in the drop-down list.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

Its absolutely fine to go for multiple domains using the same code base or template. But the important factor here would be, content. You need to have unique content on all of those domains. As long as you maintain unique, relevant and useful content, you need not worry about the same code base being used for multiple websites. Take an example of Wordpress websites that are using the same template or code base. Hope it helps my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi