Tips For Buying A Website - 3

This is a summary of a post at digital point about Tips for buying a website.

Originality

Some webmasters build a web site, make a dozen clones of the web site, and then sell off each clone as an original web site.

The clone web sites are then penalized by Google's duplicate content filter.

In addition, if there are a dozen web sites offering substantially the same content, those web sites will have to divide the same limited number of web visitors between them.

Tip: Check the originality of the website for originality using Copyscape.

AdSense

Some webmasters sell their websites after they have been banned by AdSense.

Tip: If you intend to use AdSense on a web site, examine the web site to ensure that it is compliant with the Google AdSense ToS and Program Policies.

Tip: Before placing AdSense on any new domain that you purchase, write adsense-support@google.com and notify them that you have purchased a used domain. This will prevent your AdSense account from accidentally becoming confused with that of an AdSense cheat.

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 domain 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These came from digitalpoint if you want to see the orginals they are here:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=50055

These are some of the good tips for buying a website,  I have also had the experience from sitepoint where they deleted my posts and told me not to say negative things about the sites for sale.  Seems they would be partially responsible for some of the people who get burned in the pump and dump sites that get sold there.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with sitepoint, just don’t base you decision to buy a website there on the fact that you don’t read anything bad about the site, that might not be very accurate.

That’s my opinion anyway.