Valuing Old Sites

There have been several threads here about how to value web sites.

Given that Google seems to favor old sites, how does one go about valuing an older site? Basing it on income doesn't work, as often there's little or no income.

In the last while, I've seen several sites for sale. On these sites, income is zero or close to zero. The selling point of the sites is that they have been around continuously for 5 or more years and often have a link profile that would be extremely difficult to obtain nowadays.

I hate to pay for "potential" but I've played with new domains and with old domains, and it's much easier to do well with the old domains. It's just very difficult to value. How do people here do value these sorts of domains?

 

I think it comes down to what you think you can do with it. Some here can start making $1500 per month or more off of an old domain on the first month.

 

Very good reply, and this is why some will bid more because they know exactly how they will make their money back with a old domain.

 

One of the benefits of old domains, is that many times they already have backlinks. Although the site may not have existed for quite some time, lots of old backlinks may still remain.

 

There are actually a lot of factors that goes into determining the value of an old site including the ones mentioned above.

I will tell you some of the things that I have learned about this over the last few years, but not everything, because there is a lot more actually.

The number one thing to look at in my opinion on older TLD's (you know what I mean right, .com's, .net, .org, and so on) is Google. The algo that they have been using for years restricts new sites by the method of filters that are in place to protect from so called spam sites. Yes there is more to it than that. But, by putting these filters in place it makes it very difficult to throw up a 10 to 10,000 or more page site that is SEO'd to the max and all original content with the intent to rank it over night. There are many ways to get around this but most people don't know how. These filters sometimes are referred to as a sandbox effect. The fact is, they really slow down your ability to start getting traffic into your site from SERP's on Google if you don't know the ways to beat them.

I have got to get rid of this peon level, is there not a better term?

Older sites and in many cases just an older domain (based upon many other variables) allows someone the ability to not be restricted by time, baclinks, PR, or indexed pages, to rank a site. Now, wouldn't you want to use an older domain?

How do you get around that without having to break the bank to buy a domain?

1.Use subdomains, use hosts that allow placement of subdomains under their own domain that it years old. There is more...but for another time. You want to prove it to yourself. Throw up two sites, one on a big free hosting company like Ripway, and another on a TLD that is under 6 months old. Six months really dosn't matter actually. One page on each. Hand write the content, in fact, skip the content. Put up a title, and one sentence with your keyword in it. No more, yes tags help a little and so does content but that is going off subject. How many links does it take to rank that keyword? Big question, and no time for the answer right now. If it's a regular keyword phrase you are after put 100 to 500 links into both sites or less if you want, but using over a hundred will help. In less than 7 days the subdomain is going to be indexed and ranking on Google, the TLD is not. In fact it might not show up for 6 months in the SERP's, but it will be indexed anyways! This example can also be applied to number 2.

2. Here is trick that is well used in the black hat and white industry to beat the filter, choke, new site rule, sandbox or what ever you want to call it. Buy non TLD's domain names. It works and works well. It's better if they are from other countries and they have just been released to the public for purchasing. 72 hour ranking page one Google on tough keywords is not a dream, it's the truth. If you answer no way, your wrong. I have done it over and over again. It works today, last month, last year, and I have no idea how much longer it will work in the future. What are the other requirements?
I would love to tell but this is what I get paid for.

Note: This does not work with all domain extension types, but you would be amazed on how many it does work with.


Do you need an income today from Google SERP's? Then don't buy a new TLD and expect to make a lot of money anytime soon, unless you know how to beat the box.

This is a big topic, but with research you can learn all the tricks.

 

As always the market dictates, if you have the right audience you can sell an old domain/site at a premium, how much depends on the interest. I bought a 1998 domain recently for a steal of a price and it gets 4k vistors per month with no website.

As always:
Price = how much someone is willing to pay
Or = how much someone is willing to sell for

Age = $$$ whatever way you look at it but there is no formulae

 

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Twas - I'm going to give some of your suggestions a try as well.