Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review
-
Hi All
New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights.
We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition.
Site: http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/
We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially.
But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4.
Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing.
Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe).
We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this.
Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great.
Thanks for reading.
-
Hi Dan
Thank you for the detailed and well explained response.
Yea we found the filter results pages and the issue of so many appearing and made a change to stop this. Google doesn't seem to of updated that yet. I wonder if it's worth going through and removing these from Google?
We're working on content. The site is pretty new and there are only so many hours but we'll keep pushing on with more content.
I'll look at the full report for the keywords and then work through that, thank you.
Regards
Zac
-
Hi
Few things I saw right off the bat:
- Doing a site: search in Google (site:ignitehats.co.uk) I see LOTS of duplicate meta descriptions, and LOTS of pages that look like empty search results getting indexed. (like this one)
- Google has 6,000+ pages in the index for the site, but screaming frog only found 700!!
The other answer about backlinks might have merit to it, but none of that's going to help until you get these technical issues fixed.
I would honestly proceed this way;
1. Get a complete site audit done by a professional
2. Make the technical changes needed
3. Fill out then content some more. The site overall is very "thin". Not much text, especially important pages that should carry authority like the home page and category pages.
4. Wait for Google to re-crawl
5. The use this tool to answer the question "why does a site rank where it does?" Make sure to run the full report.
6. Then work on backlinks.
-Dan
ALSO - your site is loading with AND without the www and /index.html does not redirect. All possible variations of the homepage should redirect to only one.
-
Yes the sites listed are all from us.
Thanks for your response. I guess we'll keep plugging away
-
Think i see some problems there with the links ...
melikeshoes.co.uk
grendhaflipflops.co.uk
riderflipflops.co.uk
likeshoes.co.uk
ignitebeanies.co.ukmelbymelissaflipflops.com
melbymelissa.netAre they from the same owner because all the footers looking the same. Why i am asking this is because google probably does not think it is wurth much all the same kind of link from pages of your own.
I would focus on getting good links and believe me for your site that aint going to be a problem. Maybe write somne blogs with links to your site.
-
First i wanna say...cool site really nice design...
Now comes the shitty part when i go to open site explorer i see that there i NO Link to your site.
Here i placed a link look for your self:
At your question about if it is because your site is Young .... Yes it is..Ranking takes time. There really are no short cuts or none that will last anyway. Just try to get some good links to your site and make sure the link have good ancher texts to. Over time you will see the changes.
Hope it helped a little..
If you have anymore questions ... Just ask..
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to setup an iFrame to be indexed as the parent site
Hi, we are trying to move all of our website content from www.mysite.com to a subdomain (i.e. content.mysite.com), and make "www.mysite.com" nothing more than an iFrame displaying the content from content.mysite.com. We have about 10 pages linking from the home page, all indexed separately, so I understand we'll have to do this for every one of them. (www.mysite.com/contact will be an iframe containing the content from content.mysite.com/contact, and we'll need to do this for every page) How do we do this so Google continues to index the content hosted at content.mysite.com with the parent page in organic results (www.mysite.com). We want all users to enter the site through www.mysite.com or www.mysite.com/xxxxxx, which will contain no content except for iFrames pulling in content from content.mysite.com. Our fear is that google will start directing users directly to content.mysite.com, rather than continue feeding to www.mysite.com. If we use www1.mysite.com or www2.mysite.com as the location of the content, instead of say content.mysite.com, would these subdomain names work better for passing credit for the iFramed content to the parent page (www.mysite.com)? Thanks! SIDE NOTE: Before someone asks why we need to do this, the content on mysite.com ranks very well, but site has a huge bounce rate due to a poorly designed CMS serving the content. The CMS does not load the page in pieces (like most pages load), but instead presents the visitor with a 100% blank page while the page loads in the background for about 5-10 seconds, and then boom 100% of the page shows up. We've been back and forth with our CMS provider about doing something about this for 5 years now, and we have given up. We tested moving our adwords links to xyz.mysite.com, where users are immediately shown a loading indicator, with our site (www.mysite.com) behind it in an iFrame. The immediate result was resounding success... our bounce rate PLUMMETED, and the root domain www.mysite.com saw a huge boost in search results. Problem with this is our site still comes up in organic results as www.mysite.com, which does not have any kind of spinning disk loading indicator, and still has a very high bounce rate.
Technical SEO | | vezaus0 -
Two sites
Hi there just joined had nightmere of a time trying to get a website up and running..... now i have 2 .... one marketing person did and one i did the one i did performing better on google but other onre looks more profetional is there a way i can conbine the 2 under one site..... the one that looks better and getting the benifit of the one thats performing better...... Thanks steve......
Technical SEO | | stevetemple0 -
Duplicate Content - Mobile Site
We think that a mobile version of our site is causing a duplicate content issue; what's the best way to stop the mobile version being indexed. Basically the site forwards mobile users to "/mobile" which is just a mobile optimised version of the original site. Is it best to block the /mobile folder from being crawled?
Technical SEO | | nsmith7870 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Site Purchase and 301
Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TargetClick0 -
Mobile Site & SEO
If i create a mobile site for a client will google crawl that site for mobile results or will it effect my rankings. My guess is no, just want to make sure. Obviously code will be different.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
I am Posting an article on my site and another site has asked to use the same article - Is this a duplicate content issue with google if i am the creator of the content and will it penalize our sites - or one more than the other??
I operate an ecommerce site for outdoor gear and was invited to guest post on a popular blog (not my site) for a trip i had been on. I wrote the aritcle for them and i also will post this same article on my website. Is this a dup content problem with google? and or the other site? Any Help. Also if i wanted to post this same article to 1 or 2 other blogs as long as they link back to me as the author of the article
Technical SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Should I try to optimize for SEO a site that lives only for 5 days
Hi, we are actually building a new microsite that will live on promo.domain.com. The site will have a promo for about 5 days and will be changed for a new promo after 5 days. Considering that the site www.domain.com has a high autority (67) and is well indexed in search engine, should I try to optimise this site for keywords such as promo "keyword" rebate "keyword" cheap "keyword" even if the site will be optimized for those keywords only for 5 days. We are already doing PPC campaign on these keywords but I am wondering if Google will have the time to rank us in the top 10 results in those 5 days or if I am loosing my time. My other option is to leave the TITLE of this site always the same like Groupon is doing and focus on very generic keywords. Which option do you think is the best?
Technical SEO | | Adviso0