How to know that a person's adsense stats are perfectly true?

How can you be sure that a person is not faking his adsense screenshots when buying a website?

 

Well, you know anything can be faked since Photoshop came along. What I do is bid subject to being able to view the website's statistics live (Awstats, etc...) before any money is transferred. Obviously you cannot look at the AdSense account live, but live statistics will give you a good idea of how honest the owner has been in his pitch.

 

Draw up a spreadsheet to correlate his Adsense figures with his traffic logs.

 

The only thing which you should count on is the amount of traffic since traffic is much harder to be faked. Once you are sure of the volume of traffic which the site receives its much easier to figure whether it is possible to generate the money.

And never count on alexa ranks.

Cheers,

 

I think... you should ask the referral stats too.. because that tells where traffic comes from

 

more stats the merrier if you're unsure, but realistically it's always a gamble. But having said that I've bought and sold sites here for the last 2 months, and for 3 years at Sitepoint and I've never had an issue at all, indeed if anything the stats often under reported the actual performance of the sites.

 

Lucky guy..

I had bought 2 sites which showed perfectly good stats...and were totally worthless..

For one of it I paid 1k on sitepoint. My advice is avoid sitepoint.

 

If you look at the adsense, then you can go to the traffic logs, then you can look at inbound links from the search engines. After that you can track down what rankings it has on search engines for keywords in the refferals list. If they match up to rankings you think would get lots of traffic then you can say with a some confidence that the numbers should be accurate.

Of course anything could be frauded, but this way you will at least get a site with search engine rankings... Of course they might be going south fast.. So my final remark is just use common sense. If you research something and it doesnt seem right just move on..

 

Ditto on the comments above, it is best to check stats and see how they correlate to the number of page impressions presented to you from adsense.

Also wise to check referrers. An example is a site I bought over a year ago. As it turned out, most of the traffic was coming from Google Image searches, and it has taken time to increase traffic from Web search.

That being said, scrutinize according to price tag. Obviously the more money you are paying for a site, the more thorough you will want to be in analyzing stats and verifying revenue.

tasty

 

I bought 2 sites 1proxy and 1arcade game not what they said........very under what they said for adsense and traffic drop couple days after sale so i guess it wil take me 3 years to refund my money...very carefull now

 

Well, I would say most sites on here are misrepresentative of the true income.

There is no reason anyone would sell a site that makes x amount of dollars with no work for one. Then the selling proce is cheap compared to what the site makes.

I call them pump and dumps. They buy a name, and .info seems tyo be the extension of choice now since its only .99 a year now. The put up a template and then magically it gets unreal traffic for a month and then when asked he cant show stats for the other months for some reason.

My favorites are the myspace resource sites. They claim all this income and well I have 30 diff ones and the average PPC is a few pennies and nothing like the PPC they are claiming. When you goto there site its showing ads for some other topic and not what the site is, to me thats an indicator of something not right.

I guess its everyone trying to get rich that you have the pump and dumpers and then those who want to buy a cash cow for 100.00

Buyer beware and dont believe anything they say. If its making that much money, thats the listing where the site is 2000.00