Being a site buyer can be tough, there are many site owners who lie, trick and deceive to try and get more money for their website. But now there is another factor that IMO is the cancer of the site buying and selling industry.

Domain and website appraisals

A domain or site appraisal site is a site that will attempt to guess the valuation of your website.

The important word here is GUESS, they don’t actually know the value of your site, so they use basic algorithms to make a very vague guess.

The sneaky trick

These sites exist for only one reason, they want you to give them links. So what better way of tricking you into doing this than telling you your site is worth a LOT more than it really is. Hell, if my site was worth $100k then I would tell the world.

Basically they over value your site by as much as x100 the actual value of the site. They then hope that you are dumb enough to believe that this is accurate.

Why are they a cancer?

Dealing with site owners can often be tricky. There are many good honest owners, but a lot of site sellers will tell you anything to raise the valuation. Now we have to deal with fake appraisals that are tricking site owners into heavily over-valuing their websites.

On many occasions I see people put this in their listings: “My domain has been valued at $25,000”. This can make things very awkward when the actual value of the entire site is $300.

What to do?

People are being tricked into linking to site appraisal websites, and these companies are playing on peoples stupidity to trick them. But these sites do not care about damaging an entire industry, they just want links and free publicity.