SEO Emperor

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.