Building Your Online Portfolio

Building your online portfolio

After several years of buying and selling websites, I came to the conclusion that I needed some sort of sanity check in my portfolio of websites. Far too often I had purchased websites because I got a great deal, and I knew I could resell the site for more. A lot of them I ended up keeping for various reasons, but what I ended up with was a helter-skelter portfolio. I was all over the place, and there were far too few synergies among my portfolio. I’ve been working on fixing it for well over a year.

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How do you verify stats when buying a website?

One of the ‘gotchas’ about buying sites is stats manipulation. I’m speaking specifically about website traffic, but this could equally apply to revenues or any other statistics that you take into consideration when buying a website. How do you verify what the seller is showing you is true?

With traffic stats, I think the best measure is to have them add Google Analytics to the site, if it’s not already on, and have them grant you access (Analytics allows the owner to share the stats with anyone who has a Google account) and watch it for a few days (or just look at the historical stats if it’s been in place long enough).

Other ways to verify are not as satisfactory. You can look at Alexa rankings, and that might help. For example, there was one site for sale in Sitepoint’s marketplace recently in which the seller stated hundreds of thousands of unique visits per month, yet the Alexa ranking shows above 500,000. So, that seems a bit absurd. I don’t consider Alexa very accurate, but you can get a good rough idea that a site getting hundreds of thousands of unique visits probably should have a sub-100,000 Alexa ranking and if not something is smelling fishy with the sale.

In addition to factors such as checking a site’s PageRank and backlinks, this is something I look very closely at when buying a site. Because in my opinion the traffic is one of, if not the, most valuable assets of a website.

You might also be interested in finding out where to buy and sell websites.

Site flipping article on Sitepoint

My Sitepoint article about flipping websites is up.

Give it a read!

I’d love to have any feedback, either here or there in the comments.

And, what should I write about next!

Protecting yourself when buying a website - PageRank

This is part of a series I’m writing about safety in website purchasing.  As the market grows, so will fraud.  When I started buying and selling websites, I pretty much knew everyone in marketplaces like Sitepoint.  Now, there are so many people jumping into the market every day, it’s impossible for me to keep track of who’s a player and who’s a scammer.

You’ll often see PageRank listed as a key feature of a website.  Particularly, when the index page, or other pages on the site are showing a PageRank of six or higher in the toolbar.  This can influence how much people will pay for a website.  This is particularly so when a significant portion of a website’s revenue comes from selling text link ads.

How can we verify whether the PageRank is solid?  Well, in most cases, fake PageRank is easily discovered.  The first thing you want to do is go into Yahoo! Site Explorer and see where a site’s backlinks are.   Type in the site url, and click ‘Explore URL’ and have a look through the results.  Use the url for my blog as an example, http://www.petertdavis.net
The first thing you’ll see is what pages Site Explorer recognizes on the site.  Just verify that this is in line with your expectations for the site.  My blog shows just over 800 pages, and that’s pretty much what I’d expect.  Then, click the ‘Inlinks’ and see what that lists.  You’ll notice it gives a number, which is how many backlinks Site Explorer thinks the site has.  What that means is, any page on any website that contains a link to any page on the site you’re examining.

Is the number of Inlinks Site Explorer shows in the range you expected?  If you’re looking at a site being sold as a PageRank 7, and Site Explorer shows a dozen or less Inlinks, that should throw up a red flag.  This blog shows over ten thousand Inlinks, and that would be a strong indicator that the PageRank of this domain is solid.

In addition to looking at the raw number of Inlinks, next you’d browse through to see the diversity of the Inlinks.  Are they all coming from a small group of domains, or are there many different domains?  You want to make sure that the links are diversified, and not all coming from websites that the seller controls.  It’s a common trick that all of the PageRank is coming from the sellers own website, and if you have no guarantee that those links will remain in place, you can expect to see a drop in PageRank very soon.  I call this “Inbred PageRank.”
More serious than Inbred PageRank is hijacked PageRank.  This doesn’t happen so much anymore, but during 2005 and 2006, I saw dozens of examples of a supposed high-PageRank site being sold, but the PageRank was hijacked from another domain.  I won’t explain how it’s done, that’s easy enough to find out, but I’ll explain how to detect it.

What you need to do is start going to the sites listed in the Inlinks list, and verify that the link actually exists.  Under normal conditions, you will find pages in the Inlinks list that no longer have the link.  This is normal.  Expect it.  However, if you can’t find the link on any of the pages, that’s bad.

The more you’re investing in a site, the more of the Inlinks list you want to examine.  You can discover some interesting things.  Perhaps there is a single large source of PageRank, and all the others are minor.  You’ll know that your PageRank is heavily dependent on a single source.  That’s a risk you need to know about when you’re buying a site.  What you hope to find is a diversity of types of sites and strength of PageRank in the Inlinks.  You don’t want to find that only, or primarily the Inlinks are from directories.  You want to see links from content and resource pages as well.

This should give you a primer on what to look for when the site you’re buying includes an attractive PageRank.  Even when you’re buying a lower PageRank site, you may want to give a look at the Inlinks in Site Explorer.  It does give you an insight into what type of marketing the owner has done for the website.  Good luck!

Website Buyer’s Time Saver

A few days back a friend launched a site that I’ve found to be a big time saver. As I posted a while back, there are a number of sites that I routinely check when I’m on the prowl for new websites to buy. Bizmp.com takes the new threads from many of those marketplaces, and links to the source. So, instead of checking a dozen sites, I just check one, and click directly to the sales page of the ones I’m interested in seeing. Big time saver. Bookmark it.

Where to buy a website

I get asked this a lot, so I’m just going to post a list here. These are the places I regularly look at when I’m out to buy a website.

Sitepoint’s Sell Your Site Marketplace

Digitalpoint’s Buy, Sell, Trade Sites Section

Namepros Developed Sites for Sale

Geek Village Website for Sale

DN Forum Developed Websites

Ebay Internet Businesses and Websites

Webmaster Talk Websites for Sale

Search Engine Forums I Want to Sell My Website

BizBuySell Internet Businesses (you need to do the search yourself)

Webhostingtalk Other Offers and Requests

These are just the places where I’ve had success hooking up with people to make a deal. There are other places, the list could go on forever, but these are the ones that I will regularly visit.

The best of all method is when people contact me directly. If you have a website for sale, I welcome you to pitch it to me, send it to my email address p-t-da-v-is-at-g-m-a–i-l.-c-o-m (remove the hyphens).

And, if you find a great buy as a result of this post, be sure to send me a commission! Good backlinks work as well as cash.

Sitepoint’s Marketplace Succeeds Again

Jeremy Wright writes that Sitepoint’s marketplace has brought the sellers a higher price than the first time they tried to sell it. Kudos, and hope the sale is completed this time. Jeremy tried to broker the site, BlogExplosion.com, a few weeks back, thought he had a buyer but didn’t. This time around, he posted it up in Sitepoint’s marketplace, and got a bunch more interest.

I’ve been involved in Sitepoint’s marketplace for several years, as a moderator, buyer and seller. I’ve had a few people complain to me that they’d like to see me write on my blog about some of my experiences with buying and selling websites. Most of the deals I do aren’t as significant as that, but if people want to hear it maybe I’ll start posting about it.