Spy before you buy - best practices for website buyers

Perhaps instead of selling a website, you thought of buying an already established online property with proven track record in terms of traffic and revenue. Obviously, as a buyer you would probably use either Digital Point or SitePoint.

The important question here is how to maximize your chances of investing in a good property which would indeed ensure you some return.

In the perfect world you could simply ask for live access to traffic and monetization statistics. But that's rarely a case. Sellers usually provide just some proof in the form of screenshots from analytics software or AdSense interface, etc. That's all nice, but you still should make every effort to perform proper due diligence before spending any money on your next website.

Best tools for website due diligence

Without access to hard data, your research can never be 100% precise and complete. Even more, given the existing tools, you could easily be off by order of magnitude in your estimates. Still, it's better than buying a website only to discover afterwards that the domain has been banned from AdSense. Or that it had a history of some blackhat SEO practices and is banned from Google.

Therefore, before buying any website, use the tools listed below to screen the website as much as possible.

1. Pages indexed in the search engines. Use the site: operator in any of the primary search engines to see how many pages are included in the index. Examples for Google, Yahoo and MSN. If the site is well indexed, at least some work has been already done for you. Just keep in mind - indexed does not equal getting any traffic.
   
2. Links to your website. Inbound links are still the single most important factor to achieving high rankings in the search engines. Yahoo provides the best tools to check incoming links for any website. Go to search.yahoo and use the link: operator followed by your target domain. You will be redirected to the Yahoo! Site Explorer - a very convenient tool where you can define if you want to see links only to a specific page or to any page in the domain, as well as if you want to exclude links from your target domain. See if there are any unusual patterns in the incoming links (for example, many of them with the same anchor text or links from link farms, etc.).
   
3. Check the supplemental index in Google. If a site is indexed by Google, wbut most of its pages are in the supplemental index, they are not going to rank well. Google may for consider them duplicate or low quality content. There is a special syntax to show only supplemental results from any domain. Just compare the number of this pages to the total number of pages indexed by Google and use your judgment to decide if the ratio is right.
   
4. Check PageRank (PR) of the website. Everybody says that PR does not matter any more, but everybody is still happy to see his or her PR go up. PR remains an indicator of the site's quality and you should include it in your evaluation (unless you're buying a brand new website - the publicly accessible PR values are updated only several times a year). Don't look only at the main page - check PR also for some internal pages to see if the site's architecture is correct and if PR is being distributed properly. Hint - the easiest way to check PR is by using the Google Toolbar.
   
5. Validate PageRank to see if it was not faked. There is a simple technique which allows faking of the PR which is displayed in the Google Toolbar. You could be misled to believe that you're buying a PR5 (or PR6, PR7 or any other) website, whereas in fact, it could be PR0 or PR1. There is a simple trick to defend yourself against this - just use the info: operator in Google, followed by your domain. For example, try this query. If the URL displayed in the results is different than the one in your query, it is probably redirected and PR could be fake. You could also use one of the many PR-validation services to automate the process.
   
6. Check Google cache. Use the cache: operator to see if Google holds a cache of your target website. If it's not in the cache, this could be a sign of some problems. If it is, have a look at the date showing when the page was last spidered by Google. Obviously, if it was a long time ago, it means that some serious SEO work could be required. Try this example.
   
7. Look for Google AdSense. As Google AdSense is one of the easiest ways to monetize websites, you really want to make sure that your target is not banned from the program. If it is already displaying AdSense ads, simply have a look at the source code of the page to make sure that there are no tricks and that the AdSense code is properly embedded in the main code of the website that you're buying. If there are no AdSense ads, ask the website owner to place a code just for testing purposes.
   
8. Get traffic idea at Alexa.org. Alexa.org is one of the very few services which can give you a rough idea of the traffic your target website receives. However, it is notoriously inaccurate. If your target website is not in the top 100,000 of websites in the world (according to Alexa), don't even bother with drawing any conclusions regarding traffic. Even if it is in the top 100,000, actual traffic figures may vary wildly for similarly ranked websites, depending on their niche. Internet marketing site ranked 50,000 in the world probably gets much less traffic than a gardening site with similar ranking. This is because Alexa.org relies on data from its toolbar, which is used primarily by people involved in SEO, web design, technology, etc., and they are significantly over-represented. Still, Alexa.org may offer some interesting information, such as distribution of the incoming traffic by country.
   
9. Get second idea of traffic at Compete. Compete is a competitor of Alexa.org. It also offers nicely presented traffic data collected via a special toolbar. However, I feel that its sample is much smaller than in case of Alexa.org. Compete may be useful in case of really well-established websites to double-check data from Alexa.org. Additionally, Compete is focused almost exclusively on the US market, as opposed to Alexa.org, which is more internationally-oriented.
   
10. Check Page Strength at Seomoz.org. Very cool people at the Seattle-based Seomoz.org have create an all-in-one tool, which weights in a number of factors to give you the overall page strength, i.e. an indicator of how the visibility of the website in search engines, directories, social networking sites, etc.  Very useful for initial screening of your potential targets.
    
11. Use SpyFu to check both organic and paid traffic vs. competitors. SpyFu is a service that I've already mentioned in the past on various occasions. It may not be useful in every case, but if your target website receives decent amount of traffic, you have a good chance of discovering some of the keywords it ranks for and whether it is using any paid advertising to drive traffic. Another useful feature is the listing of competitors for any given website - gives you a slightly better grasp of the competitive environment.
    
12. Try Archive.org to see if no objectionable content was published in the past. Archive.org is absolutely unique in what it provides - it is a wayback machine which can show you the content of almost every website from many different points in the past. Use it to see if your target website (domain) was not involved in port, spamming or other shady practices, which could get you banned from search engines or certain programs. 
    
13. Check your IP-neighbors using Domain Tools. Many websites use shared hosting. Being in a bad company on the same IP could cause you some troubles in the search engines, so make sure that you're not in the spammy crowd (unless you're buying a spammy website yourself, that is). Open an account at DomainTools and this will allow you to use their Reverse IP tool - simply enter your target website's URL into the form and the service will find out other websites hosted on the same IP.  
    
14. Use Whois service at Domain Tools. Whois is another extremely useful service of Domain Tools. It goes far beyond the typical whois listing, providing many additional details. You can get a basic SEO analysis of a website (together with a score),  link analysis, information if a website is blacklisted, where it is hosted, etc.

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