Site Flipping University

When buying websites or blogs, there are a million bogus deals out there just waiting for a sucker to come along and eat the bait. There are wonderful deals to be had online, but you just have to be careful and do your due diligence before biting on what appears to be a wonderful deal. I want to show you a few of the ways experienced blog and website investors do their homework before big purchases.

Backlink Search

There are a million tools out there to do a backlink search for a site. My favorite is DnScoop, because of it’s ease of use, and access to a lot of research tools right there on the page. I can also recommend iWebTool, due to the number of tools they have accessible to you as well.

A backlink search is very important when buying a blog. It’s not uncommon to find a newer blog that is a PageRank 0, but has 2,000+ backlinks. When this happens, the blog isn’t worth much… but to the investor it’s GOLD! We know, that barring something unexplainable, that with that number of backlinks, it’s well on it’s way to a Google PageRank update. This recently happened to me on a site that I will be selling shortly. It was a PageRank 0, but it had over 1,600 backlinks, so I knew that it was well on it’s way to an upgrade. Well, to my surprise, 3 days after I purchased it… it was a PageRank 4. It’s value just went through the roof in comparison to what I had paid for it. I’ll sell that site shortly for 1,000+% profit.

You can also do a backlink search by going to Yahoo or Google and typing in links: http://yourdomain.com - just to make sure that we don’t have any “slow” people here… make sure to enter your correct domain name, instead of http://yourdomain.com!

Archived Pages

Using the Wayback machine at Archive.org - you can check for archived versions of the website you wish to purchase. Don’t use this as an iron-clad guarantee, because it doesn’t necessarily update as often as it should, and updates are often incorrect, but it can be a good factor to evaluate a site that is a bit older. For newer sites (less than a year), it’s not generally worth checking, but for older sites, you can check to make sure that it always was, what it is being marketed as. For example, I don’t want to buy a Make Money Online site that used to be a porn domain.

PageRank Checker

Using iWebTool, or DnScoop, or even PR Checker, you can check to make sure that the visual PageRank on a page, is the ACTUAL pagerank.

For whatever reason, some pages get a visual pagerank (the PR that appears in the toolbar) that is inaccurate. Well, sometimes the buyers don’t know this, or other times they do know, and are trying to scam you out of some real money. The easiest way to protect yourself it to type in the URL to a PageRank checker, and to see what they have to say about it.

Indexed Pages

Not only do you want to check to see how many pages are indexed in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN… you also want to make sure that they are even indexed! Some sites are banned from these search engines due to duplicate content, spam, pornography, or any number of other factors, such as black hat seo methods. So it’s always important to do a quick search of the site in the search engines. Type in the url, and make sure the site comes up! DnScoop will also show you how many pages are indexed in popular seach engines. If nothing comes up, don’t necessarily buy the “my site is new” excuse. These are often domains that have been banned!