Buying an affiliate website – don’t get ripped off

Posted by John Wright in the Getting Started, section.

Are you considering buying a website but not sure what it is worth? Learn some tips and tricks to research a website before you buy so you don’t get ripped off.

I have been recently asked if I was interested in buying a website. Of course I needed to know the price and the website in question. I was given the website name and address, then told how much it supposedly made per month which was a generous figure. Then I was told that they were selling because they needed to raise money to pay for health care followed by a large asking price.

According to the seller the website is about gambling and in a few months produces $1500/month while getting 2500 unique visitors per month. The deal for the website was supposedly at a bargain paying 24 months up front but at a rate of $1000/month instead of $1500/month. $24,000 is a lot of money to pay for a website with content. So in 5 minutes time I was able to do my research to assess the value of this domain. I won’t disclose any information about the person or domain but perhaps you can learn a trick or two about finding out what a website is worth.

Domain Research Tools and Whois domain information

Checking whois.net information: Domain created mid July, 2010 expires 2011. This means the domain was bought recently but since it expires in 1 year this person might not be as serious about this website. If you make $1500/month you will pay a bit more $ to secure it for more than just 1 year.

Traffic Analysis

Checking compete.com and Alexa.com stats shows that this website has virtually no visitors at all.

PageRank Checker

PageRank was 0 as expected.

Backlinks Checker

Using Yahoo Site Explorer shows the website has under 20 links pointing towards it, which of course all links were rather weak ones.

Search engine testing

I tested the domain to see if it ranked for it’s own keywords since the domain was keyword1keyword2.com type format and it just doesn’t show up at all.

Copyscape and stolen content

I searched for some of the content on this site to see if it existed on other sites and the whole website is copied. There was no original content put up on this website at all.

Conclusions about buying a website

This person is attempting to rip people off with this website. It would take approximately 4 hours to reproduce a website in the same manner with copied content and that certainly isn’t worth $24,000. Based on the above information this website isn’t worth $20. Having copied content on your site is a good way to ensure that you’ll never show up in a search engine and you may risk having your website host shut down your account or have affiliate accounts banned as well.

Last but not least this person said they were selling the site and needed the money to pay for surgery in an EU country they live in. If this person actually lived in europe they would know that the country in question has public health care.

One final point a gambling website with 2500 uniques per month is worth a lot more than $1500/month in income!