For such website owners, Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans, veterans of the SEO industry, have started DIYSEO – a framework guiding them step by step through their site optimization and promotion process. For only $49/month, they walk their subscribers through all the steps required to achieve online success with their websites.

Who is this platform good for? Any small business owner launching a new site on a new domain, or those who’s had a website for a while but never got to doing anything with it. Unless your small business sells viagra, what Andy and Patrick teach you should be enough for you to rank in your niche – especially if you target local market.

Who will not find it enough and would still need dedicated professional attention to their site? If you are in a market with fierce competition, or had your site banned, or purchased a domain that previously had issues, DIYSEO may not be enough to sort it all out. However, there is no need to think that in such cases, you are doomed to spending all of your business’ profits on SEO consulting. Often, once you get professional advice of an SEO (like me) to sort your most serious issues, you can then go ahead and continue working on your site yourself – which is when DIYSEO will come handy again.

DIYSEO also offers a free trial so you can see for yourself if their approach is right for you before you commit to the monthly fees. You can sign up for it here

What’s even worse, sometimes the site owners unknowingly help negative SEO efforts by creating vulnerabilities on their site that can be exploited by others. These can be: duplicate content, absense of the robots.txt file, poor site navigation, to name just a few.

Another version of negative activity against a site is creating negative online reputation. You may still be ranking for your keywords, yet if your potential customers look up your business’ name in Google they may see negative mentions which will influence their decision to become your customers.

Luckily, many of these issues can be fixed or even prevented before any malicious activity happens. Here is a great post with a list of sites that can be used to leverage your business’ online reputation. As for eliminating onsite vulnerabilities, it takes a close look at your site to identify them.

I’ve been approached a few times by people asking me how they can remove a competitor’s site from the SERPs. I never took on those jobs but even a quick check of some of the sites revealed that with some of them, it wouldn’t have been difficult to do it due to their flaws. This made me launch a new service – SEO security consulting.  Hopefully it will help interested site owners protect themselves from possible malicious activities.

UPDATE: To facilitate online reputation management, I have created a custom Ubiquity command to check BoardTracker for mentions of a keyword or a site across forums and discussion boards. Enjoy!

Of course I am only available for a limited time during the day – but whenever you see me online feel free to contact me with your questions. If it is something that can be sorted out in a short chat session, it will be my pleasure to help you.

1. I finally have some spare time for consulting, and I am interested in looking at some sites other than mine, and I’m interested in doing some SEO consulting for clients again.
2. People kept asking me about this blog and if I had plans putting it back on – so here we go.
3. Although I have read and remember very well the warning of Aaron Pratt on how bad it is to delete 80% of your blog posts for your future ranking, I find it interesting to be able to experiment with it first hand and see if things have changed – for better or worse – in the last couple years. I have already run a number of experiments on this domain so one more wouldn’t hurt I guess.

I have restored all the posts I had archived in any form – that wouldn’t be a complete archive by any means but I believe all the most important posts are back on here. At least I am hoping to get back the link value as there is now a redirect to the 404 page for everything that no longer exists.

There is still a lot that needs to be done, as in editing the blogroll, setting up the theme (for now I just decided to use one of the WP themes by Chris Pearson – can’t be a bad choice for anything at all – hey Chris ), setting up links to the home page of IrishWonder’s SEO Consulting site, etc. But this is a start, and I will continue with it in the next few days.

I’ll report on my progress as I notice anything interesting.

You might be wondering at this point, you didn’t buy your domain off the previous owner but simply registered it with a registrar – how come it was banned before you bought it? Well, domains that were owned by somebody but then expired won’t show up as belonging to somebody else at the point when you’re buying them. Most often, if it has expired a good while ago, you won’t even see anything pertaining to the previous owner in the whois check and/or history. There is also Google search and there might be cached pages if you’re lucky – but if a domain doesn’t show up during Google search it migth mean two things – either it’s never been used – or it’s been banned. Even the Wayback Machine doesn’t help in some cases – you might see a domain saved in it but nothing showing when checking to see the saved versions.
How and why do domains get banned? – It’s a common practice of Google to kick the sites it doesn’t like for different reasons out of their index. However, once you’ve determined that your site has been banned there are ways to get it back into the index, though it takes some skill to do it right.

Check out what I have to offer regarding site bans investigations