I Know Nothing About Buying Websites
So, I placed an ad on a very popular webmaster website recently… looking to buy websites. Medium traffic sites. And I thought I did a decent job of laying out requirements for the sites. Simple — some unique content, some traffic, some revenue, some history (this is obviously simplified, but I don’t want a templated, crap site). I indicated that I’d base my initial offer on a simple revenue times 10 ot 12 months formula. Now what kind of site do you think people offered up?
- Templates sites with under 2 months of history?
- Domains with no content?
- Sites displaying wiki content?
You got it… all of these. Everyone must have thought I was some internet noob with no idea what I was doing. But, the one that topped them all was an obvious made for Adsense site. You know the kind… 10 or so pages of content specifically targeting high value Adsense keywords. What’s so bad about that you ask? Let me detail it while obscuring some of the facts so as to protect the intended seller (why? because I am nice).
- the site was under 5 months old
- it was said to be pulling 2000+ uniques per month
- it was said to be making close to $40 per month
- it was said to be search engine optimized
- the seller was asking $900, with a sincere face
Alright, so if we take the 12 times revenue approach, I should try to talk the seller down to about $480, and walk away happy. But… just 10 minutes of digging found the following red flags.
- the site had a PR0. Sandbox you say? I guess I can agree.
- searches for even exact keywords for specific text passages on the site returned 0 hits
- a site command returned 0 hits on Google
- every page had the same meta description tag (something that inadvertently had much of the content on some of my sites shifted to supplement — effectively drying up organic search traffic)
So I wondered to my self… how does someone get 2000 uniques per month with no inbound links, no indexed pages in the largest search engine, a site with limited optimization?
It did not add up to me. I asked whether the traffic was bought (pops, ppc arbitrage, etc)… and the response I got was that no traffic had been bought. My final thoughts… if you can’t find the site via a search — especially an exact phrase search, if it has a PR0, if you can’t find any backlinks, if the seller proclaims 2000+ uniques per month (with no way to find it via search engine), if the site is a made for Adsense site (given the previous facts)… someone is either lying or ignorant.
So what did I do? You can bet I did not pay $900 for a site that could be built in a half a day and have the same index results by the end of another day.
I did get several intriguing offers, but by a large majority, I got scam artists, people who either could not read or were not smart enough to understand simple terms, or people who bought into these Adsense sites and were now trying to justify their selling price based on what they paid and not the real value.
Overall, a disappointing process.