Fraud Tips for Buying Web Sites

Good post overall. I just have a couple sticking points.

Not necessarily. Perhaps at DP, but in the rest of the world, a website could have $0 and be worth far more than another website making $X monthly. If you are buying solely to add some revenue with no desire to market, grow and so on--then yes.

Again, not really. Ok, maybe 5, but a website with 20 great pages could be worth a ton more than a website with 5,000 pages (article submission sites come to mind). Sounds like you are slanting this solely towards a SE basis, but in the real business world, quality and originality matter.

If your 5,000 pages are simply duplicates or poor quality content, it's not worth much.

Overall, a good post--just wanted to add more detail. Originality is a good point. Buying turn-keys and duped sites not only divides traffic, it forces you to market even harder. These types of sites have their place, but not as your main website in the world.

 

Great post. If you posted this over at Sitepoint I think they would ban your arse. That place is a haven for scammers.

 

Great Post.

 

Can I add my own tip?

Make sure you check the page count over a few days... a lot of the times google will index a lot of pages then start taking away duplicates and useless pages.... the site will end up from ie 100,000 to 10,000. or from 10,000 to 500.

Don't just take spontaneous action based on the number of pages.

 

Covered a lot, very good post.

some others I have run into... I recently looked at a site on ebay that had revenue for the last 5 months of $1000 per month with perfect screen shots. site got bid up very high,
I feel sorry for the buyer, when I checked the doman name it was created 2 weeks ago.
I also check alexa - this can be faked but it sometimes gives you information.
one seller claimed he had high traffic for the last 6 months but it was down a little this month. Alexa showed very little traffic for 5 months then high traffic for the last month.
This seller was probably using pay per click advertising to get traffic for a month claiming it was from search engines.

 

Thanks Will, interesting info.

 

thanks Will.. great post...

 

Nice handy tips.

 

I haven't used SP for too much, but what do you mean by that, would you mind to explain?

thanks

 

Very Nice info Will, i bookmarked the thread for future reference

 

Nice post Will.

I would also add that it is often worth doing a whois lookup and emailing the owner/admin contact to confirm the site is for sale and make sure the seller actually owns the domain.

 

Great Post! Thanks for the info.

 

Lots of scam site sales their and the mods don't let anyone ask any negative questions or even suggest that a sale might be a scam in some way. They ban people for posting tough questions in sales threads.

 

Good advice, Will.

I would echo this. ALWAYS check the whois.

 

Useful post, Thanks!

 

Good post. Thanks for sharing.

 

I haven't been there in a while but I don't think I've ever seen someone "banned" for posting a tough question or attempting to expose a fraud. It's when it turns into a flame war that the mods may take drastic steps.

They will however delete posts that seem more critical than interested. Which is sad because that's just what the scammers want. I think the fact that sales threads over there are paid for kind of gives scammers dealing in high stakes sales a bit of advantage.

 

I believe that Sitepoint loses their objectivity by charging for Sales posts. They serve their clients (the advertisers( rather than the buyers. They often remove all the negative posts and leave only the positive.

I have seen a mod comment favorably on a questionable site at the same time as deleting unfavorable posts. The same moderator threatened to ban me for posting something that didn't agree with his comment.

 

Nice post Will! Thanks for taking the time to pass along the information.

 

I got several threats of banning via PM. Once I had simply asked a question about a site for sale, didn't even participate in the hard questioning about the validity of the site going on in the thread, and they still pm'd me. The mods make no effort to even try to understand what is happeing in a sale over there. They should create a function that shoots everyone in a thread a banning threat PM automatically, that would save them some time.

In the end, they did ban me.