SEO Emperor

One of my blogs was really down on traffic the last couple of weeks. Most of the traffic normally comes from google. I have written some good unique content in my native language on this blog and it ranks well for some keywords. I couldn’t really figure out what the problem was and my search engine ranking (SERP’s) hadn’t changed. While browsing digital point I came across a post about a Wordpress hack. Some code is injected to the wp-blog-header.php file, this code redirects search engine traffic to another site. I started checking all my blogs, and yes the blog that I have been working so hard on had some encrypted javascript code in that file. It’s the first time I had a security problem with one of my sites. It’s no fun working hard on a site doing your best to rank well with google and then having someone steal your search engine traffic…

To fix the problem I just deleted the whole blog (not the database of course) and installed a new wordpress, the latest version 2.5.1. I hope that does the trick. To be honest I should have updated this blog a long time ago. But I had some trouble with a plugin that didn’t work under the new 2.5 version. Lucklily I found a fix for that so I could upgrade without trouble.

Zangocash is a pay per install program, that claims big payouts. You put some code on your website and visitors can then download some software to view videos or play games and so on. Doesn’t sound bad? Zango is formerly known as 180solutions, 180solutions is an adware provider with a very bad name. The software you install will pull in ads related to the websites you visit and install other programs that behave like spyware. Uninstalling it is quite difficult for non computer savvy people. I have seen more and more sites with zango in the last couple of months. A lot of webmasters are reporting big payouts from zango on webmaster forums. I think it’s a very dirty way of making money, and really dont want anything to do with these kind of programs. I have also read reports of webmasters that had there sites deindexed by google after putting Zango code on their sites.

When buying a website there is always a lot of risk involved. The owner can claim all he wants and show you all sorts of screenshots. But you will never know how real they are, it’s to easy these days to photoshop a couple of screenshots. So we have to guess how much traffic the site really gets. Luckily there are a couple of sites that can give you an idea what kind of traffic a website receives. The most famous one is Alexa, Alexa will give you a graph showing the percentage of global internet users that your site receives, and a traffic rank. This traffic rank is what it’s all about. The lower this rank the more traffic your site gets. How Alexa gets this statistics? Well they count traffic from people using the Alexa toolbar. This is why you have to look at the Alexa rank with a grain of salt, a big grain of salt. Not so many people have this toolbar installed. From my experience the Alexa rank is only accurate for sites with lot’s of traffic. Not for small sites with only a couple of hundred visitors a day.
There is an alternative for Alexa, Compete. Compete claims to give more accurate traffic statistics. They not only use data from a toolbar but also logs from ISP’s. I check them both regularly, the only accurate results I have been getting are for my biggest site. A site that does 5000 unique visitors a day. I have lot of other smaller sites, blogs like this one for which the data is meaningless. So don’t put to much trust in statistics from Alex and Compete.

When you start out trying to make some money online you may think it’s easier to buy an established website. This can be true, a site that has already been online for some time may be easier to get a higher rank with search engines and attract some good traffic. It’s a fact that Google gives more credit to older sites. A website that already has a lot of backlinks, is indexed by all search engines and already gets traffic will give you a chance to make money from the day you buy it. Some sites may be for sale just because the owner doesn’t have the time anymore or has lost interest. Maybe you don’t want to bother with designing a totally new website and want to concentrate on writing/making new content. Or you have found a nice website for sale with good content that hasn’t been marketed yet. It all depends on what you are good at.

There are hundreds of websites for sale on the big webmaster forums, just check out the for sale section on Sitepoint and Digitalpoint. There are some risks involved on buying a website on these forums. Not all sellers are honest people, there is a lot of scamming happening on these forums. Some people have no problem posting faked Adsense and traffic statistics screenshots. As with most online transactions try to find all possible information on the history of the website/domain you are interested in. Try to find posts from the seller on the forum the website is advertised, sometimes just by googling the nickname of the seller you can find loads of information.

Some basic things you should always check:
1) Lookup the Itrader, reputation of the seller, read old posts from the seller and see if he has already done successful business. Ask for his/her email, MSN and have a chat to get an idea if he/she is a serious person.
2) Do a whois on the domain name to find out the age, where it is registered, when the domain expires.
3) Check out the history of the domain on Archive.org, by using the wayback machine you can see older versions of websites, sometimes from many years ago.
4) Check pagerank, indexed pages by all search engines. You don’t want to buy a website that’s banned by Google.
5) Don’t put much trust in traffic or Adsense screenshots, they may be fake. To get an idea of the traffic compare the screenshots with the Alexa rating. Ask for more traffic screenshots, it’s always interesting to know where the traffic comes from. Ask for specific screenshots to get an idea of the visitors geographical location, what keywords the site ranks for, if the seller doesn’t respond to these questions he may be a scammer.
5) Stay away from sites that are banned by Adsense. The problem is that there is no way to check this. If a site has no Adsense check with the seller why this is so, maybe he just doesn’t have an Adsense account. But the domain can also be banned by Adsense, it might be possible to put Adsense on it after buying it but it will take a long time for Google to approve the domain. There are of course other ways to monetize a website, but I prefer Adsense.
6) The price… there are no magic formulas to determine the price of a website. I have seen websites sell for 6 times the monthly revenue and others for 2 times the yearly revenue. This depends on the niche, age, traffic. A fair price for an established website with steady traffic is about 1 to 1,5 times the yearly revenue, don’t pay this for sites younger then a year. With an established website I mean a site that has been around for more then a year has some pagerank and that gets steady traffic from search engines.

This is a nice example of a website for sale that’s obviously a scam. Luckily the seller was quickly busted and got banned before he was able to sell his site. So please look out when buying a website.

What happens when you write a payed review on some product and people start to comment on it that it’s actually a bad product. Or even worse a scam… I stumbled on this real estate blog, the owner wrote an honest paid review on an online real estate service, then people started commenting about their bad experiences. Finally he gets a nice letter from a lawyer to take down the post and comments. I understand the webmaster that he doesn’t want to risk an expensive lawsuit against some big company with enough cash to sue anyone they don’t like. But what happened to freedom of speech?
Think twice when you are going to write some paid review, certainly do a background check and try to find all possible information online so you know what you are writing about.