Advice for Buyers

[catweasel]

When it comes to my investments, I always do my homework.
- Haddon (Contact)

This thread is for folks to list their methods for researching website auctions and sales.
Feel free to add any tips and tricks you know of that isn't listed here already!

There already exists a PDF guide for buyers on SitePoint so READ THAT FIRST!

Google is your friend

• Make liberal use of google. If the site has a 1800 number google it, maybe there are duplicates.
• Select a bunch of text from the site and google it to check for unique content.
• Google the sellers name and email address.
• Google the site name plus the word 'scam' to see if the site has a bad reputation.
• Google info:www.<thesitename>.com to gain further information such as inbound links, number of indexed pages etc.

Use online tools

• www.domaintools.com provides volumes of information about a site and its registrant. You can get a lot free information here as well as pay for even more detailed reports.
  If the sale involves a large amount of money consider paying for the extra report/s.
• www.aboutus.org gives more information. Check the 'related domains' section to see if there are any identical sites out there.
• www.myipneighbors.com will tell you what other sites are hosted on the same server.
• use www.compete.com and www.alexa.com to see traffic details in comparison to competitors.

Be realistic

• Don't expect unique content in the turnkey section. If you want unique content look in established sites and premium listings and have a budget greater than $1000.
• Don't assume a site's value is soley based on some arbitrary calculation of the monthly revenue. Consider traffic, indexed pages, SERP, page rank, name, age of the site, etc.

If you have any doubt about the seller's ownership of the site ask them to place a unique meta tag in the home page to verify ownership.

Each marketplace section has a column title 'Comments' telling you the total number of comments people have placed in that listing.
If the number of comments does not match the number you see in the listing you know the seller has been deleting comments.
There's nothing unusual about a couple of missing comments but if a sale is missing a dozen or more this may be cause for further investigation.

I was pretty sure I had more tips but that's about all that comes to mind right now.. oh yeah.. did I tell you to -
READ THE PDF GUIDE!

[Chris Corbyn]

Excellent points!

I'm looking forward to completing our next milestone (beyond the one we're currently working on) which is almost entirely focused on eliminating shady behaviour. We'll be verifying users with a phone number check (which coupled with feedback scores will make it very difficult to side-step getting a bad reputation by creating new accounts). We'll also be integrating PayPal to some extent. And one of the things you mention regarding the meta tag check is also in our next milestone

[HAWK]

Excellent post thanks catweasel. I'm going to sticky it.

[Dan Schulz]

And it's featured as well.

[Devious]

There are a lot of tools and resources for you to do research, but don't lose sight of why you're researching.
Understand that you need a deal that makes both seller and buyer happy, otherwise there won't be a sale. $500 for lifehacker.com is great for you, but bad for them. So don't waste your time trying to buy it.

ABORT:
Don't get stuck on one deal. In case you and the party cannot come to agreement, have other deals already in the works. The more you shop, the more you'll find that happy deal.

[petertdavis]

Here's another tip..... don't buy or sell sites using Paypal. And, absolutely don't use Paypal if it's an amount of money you can't afford to loose. I do use Paypal when buying and selling, but only if it's a very small amount of money. Typically $1000 is my threshold. Decide your own threshold and for any amount above it don't use Paypal, use Escrow.com or Sedo.com.

Paypal absolutely will not be helpful to you when there's a fraud involved. They'll help themselves. The only time the Paypal dispute resolution is successful is when you have two honest parties who have encountered a difficultly along the way and it needs to be arbitrated. If you're ripped off, chances are the money is long gone by the time Paypal gets around to investigate, and Paypal isn't going to make you whole out of their own pockets.

[petertdavis]

Oh, ya, and read this article too.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/flip-a-web-site

[Nick]

As someone who has been scammed once (not here), I urge everyone to definitely follow this guidelines. Look into past auctions the user had and see how they turned out, maybe even message the winner and see how his or her experience was with the seller.

Sometimes you can even get pertinent information about a site you're looking into by looking at past versions from Archive.org

[Matt Mickiewicz]

Excellent list and links. I'll add three more:

- Check archive.org. This will tell you how the site has evolved over time. Has the major focus of the site shifted during its history? Were certain ad networks used in the past (i.e. AdSense) that are no longer there, potentially indiciating that they didn't generate revenue or the site got banned?

- Copyscape.com is also excellent for checking on the uniqueness of content.

- Run a search of the site name, sellers username, sellers real name on technorati.com, blogsearch.google.com to see if bloggers have written good or bad things about it.

[dave owen]

Originally Posted by Chris Corbyn

I'm looking forward to completing our next milestone (beyond the one we're currently working on) which is almost entirely focused on eliminating shady behaviour.

This is great news. To be honest I've given up keeping an eye on the marketplace because it has become too tedious sorting through the rubbish, scammers, cloned sites that claim to be original, etc. Investment is a lot about the time it takes to research the investment, so if 95% of the sites I research end up being dodgy or useless, it makes the remaining 5% a lot less economical to hunt down.

I would actually be willing to pay a subscription fee to join a marketplace where all listings were manually vetted for fraud and substandard websites. My time is money - if you can save me time I'll pay you.

Good luck with the improvements, I look forward to the results.

[asp-hosting.ca]

Great advice! Thanks!

Originally Posted by petertdavis

Here's another tip..... don't buy or sell sites using Paypal.

I also would advice against using paypal for anything but small purchases. I had to dispute a payment once and they didn't do anything for months...

[3ct7]

If you buy a site based on its traffic make sure you know where its coming from. If there has been a recent upsurge be cautious. There are many ways to get traffic, if its not organic then you don't want it.

[masonry]

It's different for both buyers and sellers. But I just started the process of selling my site contestime.com and I've got some scammers contacting me so I'm pretty cautious when dealing with buyers. From the buyer's perspective, I'm not sure if I'm coming across as too reluctant to share information. It really isn't easy.

[68c10]

Hi, I am new to the Domain owners world. After the purchess of a in-expensive site that needs promoting (quite the education there!) I started looking for established sites. I am amazed at the Sites that leave 7 yr old adds on thier lists to look good, or the people that want to sell you a site that is a clone with a different name.

The advice here is sound and I have bookmarked a few sites from the posts I had not known of. I have been using mostly alexa and their Wayback link along with iweb, whois and "site" or "info" at google.

I might add "domainpage.com" to check the validity of a sites claims for thier traffic.

I REALLY appreciate the help found here and will check back daily at a minimum!

My advice for any newbie like me is to stay away from sites like Time 2 Sell and stick with reputable sites like this one. In my search for an established site I have found that there is only a hand full of legitmate places to buy anything decent, depending on budget.

Now I need help in the best way to learn how to manage and maintain a site! <G> Joomla? Dream weaver? ???????

[Jeremy W.]

Coooool.... Great work SPN and SPF teams. Now if we can get some larger (greater than 500K) deals in here, I`d be even happier ;-)

[jainmanoj123]

Excellent and very useful post....

[northbeach23]

Thanks for a very good post

[Edman]

With sites that claim to have a lot of traffic, make sure you know which countries the users come from. Lots of proxies get sold with 10,000 uniques a month, all of whom are from Iran or China, countries you cannot break even with.

The latest hit now is social network related traffic from Brazil. It is very easy to get a high number of unique users from Brazil for sites that are proxy, image upload or warez upload related. All of that traffic is completely useless. All the high traffic sites with Brazil traffic claim that you can become rich making money from all that traffic, yet are curiously unmonetized. Some sellers will even go to great lengths to make claims like Brazil is not a 3rd world country, Brazil traffic is profitable, Orkut traffic is profitable, etc, all of these are FALSE. I am yet to see a Brazil traffic site that was not a business based in Brazil succesfully monetized, but I do know a proxy owner who ended up discarding 1 million pageviews a day from Brazil because he could only break even and all that traffic was more trouble than it was worth.

[68c10]

if the site has a decent history ..Alexa will show you where most of the traffic is.....

Thanks for the tip about Brazil etc. I would not have thought of that...

[Dan Schulz]

Originally Posted by 68c10

if the site has a decent history ..Alexa will show you where most of the traffic is.....

Only for those users who have Alexa's toolbar *cough*spyware*cough* installed.

Server logs are FAR, FAR more accurate.

[skunker]

Dan, if server logs are more accurate, then why are scripts like awstats looked down upon for not being accurate?

[Jeremy W.]

Because webmasters like higher numbers. And they can see where numbers come from. They don't like the lower numbers from third party providers, and can't see where they come from, so they inherently distrust them.

[petertdavis]

Originally Posted by Dan Schulz

Only for those users who have Alexa's toolbar *cough*spyware*cough* installed.

Server logs are FAR, FAR more accurate.

That used to be true, up until a week or two ago. After Alexa adjusted the way they scored sites, pretty much every site I know of that has a heavily webmaster demographic has dropped significantly in Alexa, including Sitepoint.

[Dan Schulz]

I know they changed it, but I'm still waiting to see how widespread the change is and how long it'll last.

[Jeremy W.]

It's very widespread. And permanent. The new method if vastly superior, and puts it on par with Quantcast and Compete in terms of data accuracy (ie: as accurate as third party data can be).