Before Buying a Website

Before Buying a Website

Given that I have no experience what so ever at buying, improving and then reselling a website, I took it upon myself to do a little research. Just as I thought, it appears the online community has already done the research on this subject.

One must treat this venture with attention to details. This helps eliminate wasting your time and the time of others. Getting caught up in a bad match between a buyer and seller is a fruitless proposition. Fraud is a particularly popular proposition and requires a determined mindset to avoid. From the very beginning, the World Wide Web has been compared to the Wild, Wild West.

Here is what I have learned so far:

Before handing over any hard earned money for a website purchase, remember the Buyer Beware Rule.

Research-Research-Research

Learn who is selling- Google the names, phone numbers, emails, website addresses and what ever else relates and look for discrepancies which maybe indicative of fraud.

Research the site itself- do a Google search like- site:www.nameofsite.com and see how many hits there are. Read where these sites originate and click through to see what info is found. Discover what you can about the site traffic, age, history, number and age of pages, SERP, check the index for clues, broken links, content originality, copyright or trade-name infringement, ownership of photo’s or artwork. Legal rights are to be respected, infringement on a website is getting easier to detect thanks to special software.

Here are some websites that help in the research phases-

http://www.domaintools.com/ - registrant’s information and more
http://www.aboutus.org/ - provides good general information
http://www.myipneighbors.com/ - what other sites are on the same server
http://www.compete.com/ - compares traffic of websites
http://www.alexa.com/ - traffic and page views information
http://www.archive.org/ - historical record of websites
http://www.copyscape.com/ - site checks for duplicate content on other sites
http://www.technorati.com/ - provides many services to bloggers
http://www.blogsearch.google.com/ - blog search


I am sure there are many websites which provide more tools for the investigation phase of a website purchase, I hope to add them when I find them. If you know of some, add them to a comment. I need all the help I can get.