Aquiring domains/websites

Just info for some people who may find it of interest, to take Noppids point further I thought it may be worth a separate thread.

If you build up some cash from adsense or whatever you may want to go and buy sites, apart from the usual selling forums I think this is where DMOZ can actually have a use

If you search through DMOZ you can find well established websites that have been neglected, for a start they are listed in DMOZ so will have plenty of backlinks, it quite possible to find many PR6 domains that have been left to rot here.

Some points to note;
Look for the good established domains PR5/6+
Look for the last updated date, an easy indication that the domain has been neglected/forgotten about.
Do you normal backlink checks and make sure these links come from different sources.
If you an adsense fan then look for domains that have been neglected and dont use adsense, some of these domain owners dont know the value of what they are sitting on.

Then contact the owner.
This can be troublesome, especially if the domain hasn't been looked at for over a year, email addresses may bounce, whois info may be inaccurate, you may have to get very creative to find and contact the owner, sending snail mail letters or doing research on the owners name to see if they appear in any other sites/profiles online, in the UK friendsreuinited can be a good search tool for tracking down and contacting owners of domains.

Just my 2 cents.

I found a great directory in December, the site received over 30,000 visitors per month and had no advertising/adsense, a real goldmine. The directory had not been updated since Jan04 and all the links in the directory were broken, a script error or something but it made the whole site useless, using archive.org I realised that the site had been broken for a year
It would easily do a few thousand in adsense a month by my calculations, it took me 3 weeks to contact the owner as all emails bounced as the mailboxes were full. In the end I found him but it was fruitless as the guy was a webmaster and I woke him up a bit to the fact that it was broken/neglected. He slapped a huge price tag on it, but seeing as it was neglected/broken for a year it might just have paid of if he was willing to sell at a "normal/realistic price" and that work would have been paid back tenfold.
It now has a last updated date of Jan05 and is still a "potential" goldmine.

Still I have had success using this method for other sites.
Also remember when contacting site owners that this site may have been their baby so don't go in like a bull in a china shop and slag of the site, just say it's in your genre and would save you some time taking over an existing site hence your approach.