Writing for Your Wealth

Last week, we started talking about buying established websites to kickstart your empire building (or add to an already existing “empire”) and get the monthly checks rolling in a bit sooner. Once you find a site you’re interested in buying, it’s time to do some research.

Note: It’s easy to get bamboozled as there are a lot of folks out there trying to pass off new sites as old or low traffic sites as high traffic sites (amongst other things).

Okay, you’ve been warned. Now let’s talk about what you should check up on and how to do it.

How Much Traffic Does the Site Get?

It probably goes without saying that you would prefer a site that already has visitors coming to it.

Not only do you want to see how many visitors the site is getting a month, but you’ll want to see where they’re coming from. If all of the traffic is coming from paid advertising, you really have to question whether it’s worth it to pick up this site. If the current owner pays $100 a month for pay-per-click traffic and makes $200 a month, this kind of scenario could work, but I definitely prefer straight search engine traffic coming in through a variety of keywords.

When it comes to measuring traffic, ask to see the last 12 months worth of logs. Ideally the owner has Google Analytics set up, and you can look at that, but seeing screenshots of the site’s Awstats readouts may have to be enough, especially for smaller deals.

To double check (and make sure the traffic screenshots aren’t fudged), you can use an outside source such as Alexa.com. While Alexa isn’t a very reliable measure, especially outside of techy niches (the company’s data comes only from folks who have the Alexa toolbar installed, and if you’re not a webmaster, there’s a good chance you’ve never bothered), you can get an idea of whether or not anyone really visits this site. An Alexa rating in the high millions means visitors are few and far between.

How old is the domain name?

An aged domain name is worth more than a brand new one, so you’ll want to know when the site was originally established. If the domain name isn’t more than a few months old, there’s little point in researching further. If you wanted a new site, you could build it yourself, right?

Don’t just take the owner’s word for the domain name age. I always take a peek at a site with the Wayback Machine, an archive that goes back for years and shows you snapshots of what the site looked like back in the day.

Though this doesn’t necessarily tell you when the domain name was first purchased, it’ll show you when pages were first placed on it (and that’s all we really need to care about anyway). Also, it can show you if the site has changed over time.

These days it’s common for people to snap up an old domain name when it expires, put a new site on it, and then try to sell it as some great resource that has been online for 10 years covering such-and-such topic. Suddenly a domain name that originally hosted a site about astronomy has been switched to a site on (the more profitable topic of) home loan modifications.

This isn’t the kind of “established” site you want to buy. You want the original content with old links pointing to it.

Speaking of links…

Are there good links pointing to the site?

Google, in particular, likes not just links but “aged” links. If a five year old site didn’t start getting any links until last month, then it’s not as valuable as a five year old site with links that are three, four, and five years old.

There are tons of resources for checking how many links are pointing to a page and where they’re coming from.

This link checker does a decent job.

What you want to see here is a number of links coming from different domains and from sites that are (ideally) related in topic to the one you’re thinking of buying. Links from blogs are nice, since the post date gives you an idea of the age of the link.

Is the content original?

Even though we’re writers and we’re planning to improve the site by adding articles, blog posts, etc. of our own, we’d ideally like to get a site that already has original content. If the content is good, it’s a clue that the links we found in our earlier research were given naturally instead of purchased.

One way to check whether content is unique or has been copied far and wide is with CopyScape. They do charge five cents a search, but it’s certainly worth investing a few nickels before laying down hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy a site.

The downside to programs like Copyscape is that you’ll often come across a case (especially with blogs) where the content may have originated on the site you’re looking at buying, but other sites copied it via the feed. I wouldn’t worry too much about such a scenario, as long as the original site has more links to it, more Google PageRank, etc.

And since I mentioned it, let’s cover PageRank briefly.

Does the site have Google PageRank?

PageRank used to be a lot bigger of a deal than it is today. Briefly, it’s a 0-10 value that Google assigns based on the strength of links going into a site.

If you don’t have a toolbar or plugin installed that displays a site’s PR automatically when you’re surfing the web, you can check PageRank here.

While PageRank isn’t the end-all/be-all of valuing a site, especially these days, it can be worth taking a look. An established site should have at least some PageRank on the index page and maybe some of the back pages too.

Go forth and do research!

These are some basic resources that should help you find out whether a site is truly as “established” as the owner says it is. If you have other methods or tools for researching, feel free to mention them in the comments!

In the next post, I’ll wrap things up by covering how to value a site.