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.

Matt Cutts says Link Buying Still Works

In an interview with Stephan Spencer, Matt Cutts, the Google Spaminator admits that aggressive link buying is “more likely to help” than harm a website. Look for the quote a bit over half-way down the interview.

This may be just stating the obvious, because anyone who is still buying links will be able to produce the evidence for themselves and not need affirmation from Matt Cutts, but I think it’s an interesting point to make after such a turbulent few months in the SEO industry.

Personally, I think if you’re in a competitive industry, you have to buy links. If you don’t, you won’t compete. That goes double so for newer websites, and websites without massive marketing budgets.

Knowing where to buy your links is now the real test.

Can You Predict Google Knol’s Demise?

I say 14 months, 3 days.

It’s going to take up too many resources for Google to make a go of it.

It’s going to get spammed to death, like Squidoo.

Even the best pages will be thinly disguised self-promotion (except the ones Google employees do).

What’s your prediction?

New URL

As of now, I’m putting my blog on www.petertdavis.com and redirecting www.petertdavis.net

I’ll sort any issue with the feed as it comes up.

Getting ready to pull this blog out of mothballs.

RSSMagician Coupon

RSSMagician Coupon

I just got this in - I don’t mean to review RSSMagician, but to simply pass along a coupon to anyone who’s interested in buying RSSMagician.

Use this when you purchase and you’ll save 20% on RSSMagician.

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It also works on their other products such as BlogSolution.

Here’s their site: http://www.rssmagician.com/

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