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
-
Unsolved URL dynamic structure issue for new global site where I will redirect multiple well-working sites.
Dear all, We are working on a new platform called [https://www.piktalent.com](link url), were basically we aim to redirect many smaller sites we have with quite a lot of SEO traffic related to internships. Our previous sites are some like www.spain-internship.com, www.europe-internship.com and other similars we have (around 9). Our idea is to smoothly redirect a bit by a bit many of the sites to this new platform which is a custom made site in python and node, much more scalable and willing to develop app, etc etc etc...to become a bigger platform. For the new site, we decided to create 3 areas for the main content: piktalent.com/opportunities (all the vacancies) , piktalent.com/internships and piktalent.com/jobs so we can categorize the different types of pages and things we have and under opportunities we have all the vacancies. The problem comes with the site when we generate the diferent static landings and dynamic searches. We have static landing pages generated like www.piktalent.com/internships/madrid but dynamically it also generates www.piktalent.com/opportunities?search=madrid. Also, most of the searches will generate that type of urls, not following the structure of Domain name / type of vacancy/ city / name of the vacancy following the dynamic search structure. I have been thinking 2 potential solutions for this, either applying canonicals, or adding the suffix in webmasters as non index.... but... What do you think is the right approach for this? I am worried about potential duplicate content and conflicts between static content dynamic one. My CTO insists that the dynamic has to be like that but.... I am not 100% sure. Someone can provide input on this? Is there a way to block the dynamic urls generated? Someone with a similar experience? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Jose_jimenez0 -
Tips to promote hotels site ?
I made site to book hotels: http://bilodeals.com/ any tips to promote him and get huge traffic ?
Technical SEO | | coinvideos80 -
Why are these blackhat sites so successful?
Here's an interesting conundrum. Here are three sites with their respective ranking for "dental implants [city]:" http://dentalimplantsvaughan.ca - 9 (on google.ca) http://dentalimplantsinhonoluluhi.com - 2 (on google.com) http://dentalimplantssurreybc.ca - 7 (on google.ca) These markets are not particularly competitive, however, all of these sites suffer from: Duplicate content, both internally and across sites (all of this company's implant sites have the same exact content, minus the bio pages and the local modifier). Average speed score. No structured data No links And these sites are ranking relatively quickly. The Vaughan site went live 3 months ago. But, what's boggling my mind is that they rank on the first page at all. It seems they're doing the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do, yet they rank relatively well.
Technical SEO | | nowmedia10 -
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage. Here's the breakdown: -Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code -The site is out of our control -The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back -The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email. The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive. It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile. Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product. My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content? Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Way to spider Wordpress site
I have an old Wordpress site and I want to move it to a new server and take it off Wordpress (too many hacks). I am trying to spider the site so as to get static, non-Wordpress, pages. I am having trouble doing this. When I spider the site, it changes the URLs. For instance, if the URL is www.domain.com/page/ the URL I get out of the spider is /page/index.html And those are not the URLs in the search engine indices. There are about 2000 pages on this site, so it is not feasible to set up 301 redirects. I tried using these spidering programs: WinHTTack Website Copier and PageNest Does anyone know of another method of turning a Wordpress site into a non Wordpress site?
Technical SEO | | DanCrean0 -
Site Categorization?
I know getting site categories to appear under the site are dependent on a lot of factors including site mapping. We have a site that does the categorization thing when you type in the sites url name however more people search for the name of the talent to find the site and the short url on the site is just his name, but shorter. However I was just wondering is their a way to optimize the site so that way we could get categorization to show up under the sites URL when they search for the talents full name I ask because the amount of people looking for the talents full name rather than the short name is a lot larger and I would like to see if we can take advantage of the real estate, but I honestly don't think there is a way, however I figured I would open it up to discussion to see if anyone has any ideas. Example: Site name is ABCD you type this into Google and you get ABCD.com about blog how to contact However the actual person whose site it is is ABCDEF and when you type that in you just get: ABCD.com without any of the categories appearing below the url. And that is what I'm asking about. Thanks as I can't seem to find a lot of information on this. However if there is another spot on the site talking about this please let me know I may just not be searching with the right terms.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0