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.

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