Things To Consider When Purchasing a Site or Domain For Traffic

I was asked to evaluate a few domains and sites that a company is looking at acquiring. I think this is something that many people will start to do on small scales to promote their own offerings. If you are in the market and considering making an offer to buy a domain, it's a good idea to research the site.

The Basics of Buying a Domain for Traffic

1. Find out what search engines are driving the traffic. It better to have balanced traffic from search engines than 80% all from one. Multiple sources of traffic spreads the risk out that all the traffic will disappear.
2. Find out their linking practices. Do they do reciprocal linking? Sites that have natural links are worth much more.
3. What percent is type-in traffic? The more the better. This is less likely to go away.
4. Look at the alexa data over the longest period possible. Be weary of a quick rise in traffic. It usually means a quick fall.

Other things to consider that can affect traffic to a domain

1. What are the risks of changing ownership of the domain? I've heard of, but never seen sites lose their position in search engines when they are sold and the registration information changes. Some buy the site, but leave the domain registered to the current owner.
2. Do you plan to do a major re-architecture of the website? Major changes can affect serps (search engine result placements). If you plan to do major changes, than this brings in more risk.
3. The risk reward profile of the site. If the purchase price is worth the domain alone, then the traffic it has is a bonus. This is the best deal.

Look for unethical practices

1. Check the back-links to the site by searching for link:domain.com -domain.com. Exclude links from the domain since interlinks are less important and you want to see links from other sites coming in.
2. Links in comments sections of blogs are sign that they have gotten links in a questionable way. Also, if all the links are from reciprocal linking pages they are worth less. The best links are natural from sites that have a similar topic. You want links from sites that are on different class C ip addresses.
3. Make sure the site seller doesn't own all the sites that link to the domain you're are purchasing. Alexa shows other sites registered to the same person. You can also check whois data.
4. Look at the code and look for hidden text, and keyword stuffing. Any of these are considered black hat techniques and should bring the price down because they introduce risk.
5. Find out how they acuired the content and who owns it.

Consider how you will operate the site

1. Many webmasters build sites that are designed for them to run. Processes are usually in their heads vs documented. Try and get them documented.
2. Find out who owns the code and what licensing fees are due. Nothing like buying a site running on Oracle and then getting hit with a hefty bill.
3. Check out the performance of the site. If you plan to grow the site how scalable is the code base. This comes back to what major changes you might have to make.
4. How much maintenance will it take. If the site is dynamic, then it is more likely to be easier to update and change. If the site is thousands of pages of flat html, then this can be a nightmare to maintain all the pages in the site.
5. Find out how often fresh content is going up. When sites stop getting fresh content they can drop. It might actually be good if it has been stale for a while and the traffic remains consistent. This is a sign of authority.