Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review

[JHill]

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.

[seoroyal]

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:

Open site explorer

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..

[JHill]

This post is deleted!

[seoroyal]

Think i see some problems there with the links ...

melikeshoes.co.uk
grendhaflipflops.co.uk
riderflipflops.co.uk
likeshoes.co.uk
ignitebeanies.co.uk

riderflipflops.com

melbymelissaflipflops.com
melbymelissa.net

Are 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.

[JHill]

Yes the sites listed are all from us.

Thanks for your response. I guess we'll keep plugging away

[evolvingSEO]

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.

[JHill]

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