The key to buying websites is to find the quality web sites. But these days there is so much rubbish that it can often be like finding a needle in a haystack.
There are also many tricks used by site sellers to trick you, so here is my top 10 list of the TRICKS that many site sellers use to inflate the value of their sites.
1) False reasons for selling: I have heard it all from “I have to sell because I am going to do some charity work”, to “I have to sell because my gran is ill”. NEVER believe the reasons for selling! 99% of the time they are selling because they failed.
2) Deceptive titles: shocking example. In this example the title is “Fishing.com” but the actual site is “californiafreshwaterfishing.com”
3) Estimations/potential : This is the one that drives me mad. We are bidding on the current value of the site, not where it COULD be in 10 years time. There is a great article about false site potential here: site buying potential dangers. Remember that it takes a lot of YOUR hard work for a site to work, potential is often just fantasy.
4) Comparing their little site to a major brand in the same industry. Here is a trick that is being used more and more by site sellers. Lets presume they have a new video hosting web site with ZERO traffic, they may say something like this: “Youtube was sold for billions of dollars, so this shows that you can make a fortune with my site”
5) Not giving the URL in the post. This is a common technique used on sites like Digitalpoint.com. There are a few site owners who genuinely have a good reason for not displaying their url, but there are two other reasons why this is done. 1) If the seller has something to hide then they have more chance of getting away with it. 2) Every time a buyer requests a PM it bumps the topic back to the top, therefore getting more views. In summary, beware sites that don’t share the url.
6) Hits v Views v Uniques: If you do not know the difference between these three, then read this article ASAP. It is possible for a site to have 1000 hits per day, but only 10 visitors per day, so always ask for unique visitor stats.
7) Misleading search engine rankings: Always remember that it is not what phrases the site ranks well for in Google etc, it is how much traffic those phrases bring the site. I have seen many site sellers boasting that their site ranks top 10 for terms that would never be searched for. Always ask for the amount of hits the site gets for those terms.
8) Pagerank obsessions: It is widely known that the majority of webmasters place too much importance on Pagerank. There are certainly advantages to having a good pagerank (selling links, link trading, getting content), but this only makes a small portion of a site. If a seller is constantly talking about how great their PR5 ranking is, remember that they probably have nothing else worth saying about the site. Do you think that Youtubes PR8 was a major factor when Google were in negotiations with them? I doubt it!
9) Fake Pagerank: Now that we have established that the average webmaster places TOO MUCH emphasis on pagerank, it may not surprise you to know that it is possible to get a FAKE pagerank. I am not going to explain the exact process of how to do this, but there are tools and re-direct tricks that can get any site a huge pagerank. However, this is not a genuine pagerank, so use tools like this Fake pagerank detection tool to double check.
10) Dirty history: We all have things from our past that we would like to hide, websites are no different. Bear in mind that it is possible that a site has had numerous owners over the years. What may today be a site about dog grooming may have been a porn fetish site 5 years ago. Use the Wayback machine to see a sites history