If you’re looking to buy a website, it can be exciting to know that you’ll be taking on an established site that will hopefully make you some money. You shouldn’t rely solely on what the seller states about the website. The seller may have forgotten something, intentionally lied about something or made some assumptions that aren’t obvious. However, to make sure you don’t get ripped off; here are some of the things to check when buying a website.

Check the domain information

Verify the owner of the domain matches the seller of the site. Check that the registration data matches what the seller claims too. There might be situations in which someone selling a website doesn’t actually own it!

Check the backlinks

If you are buying a site based on the number of backlinks, it makes sense to verify how many backlinks there are. E.g. Has the seller told you that there are 20k backlinks, when in fact there are 10k in Yahoo and 10k in MSN?

If you are buying a site based on Google Page rank, which something I don’t agree with, make sure the number of backlinks roughly represents the page rank. I’d expect a PR3 site to have over 2000k backlinks. If a PR3 site only has around 100, you know that it’s either fake, or the PR is coming from a link on a high PR site. So you’ll want to check if the link will be removed after the sale or not.

Check the website traffic

If the seller is claiming x visitors per day or x pageviews a month, you need to clarify exactly how much traffic the site is getting. Pageviews represents the number of times pages are rendered on the site. One visitor can (and usually do) view many pages, so remember that pageviews does not equal the number of visitors. Ideally you want to know how many Unique Visitors the site receives each day/month, as that gives you a more accurate idea of how popular the site is.

You also want to know where the website traffic is coming from. This is where referrer information comes into it’s own. If you receive all the traffic via the search engines, otherwise known as organic traffic, then great! However, if you receive all the traffic via advertising, forums or mostly from 1 site, then this needs investigation. You need to ask the seller questions to find out what arrangements they have with advertising or those sites. Find out what you need to do to maintain those traffic generators and decide if you’re prepared to continue that arrangement.

If you can get access to the Google Analytics raw data by the seller giving you an account, that’s the ideal situation. You can also check the search engine keywords used to find the site, the previous history of the traffic, visitor bounce rate and how long visitors stay on the site, the most popular pages, etc.

What are the earnings? For how long? Where from?

If you’re buying a site based on it’s earnings, you need to find out how much the site has earnt, how long it has been earning that much, any variance in earnings, and how the money is earnt. So find out via what medium are they made, e.g. Google Adsense, affiliates, Paypal, advertising networks, etc. Check that you are eligible to sign up for any of the advertising or affiliate networks, and work out they payment schedule and rules.

I once got caught out when buying a site that as a UK citizen, I couldn’t apply for a US-based advertising system. I only discovered this after I paid for the site. The annoying thing was this advertising network was the main revenue generator for the site. It took me a lot of work to find an alterative and sustainable income stream.

What is the site’s underlying system?

Find out what the site needs in order to work. Does the site need the standard budget web hosting PHP, MySQL setup, or does it need an exotic Windows system? Seems obvious, but there are going to be sites that will catch you out. Find out if it’s a standard or bespoke content management system? e.g. Wordpress, Joomla, or perhaps a hacked up script. If the site is hacked up, it’s worth spending time looking at how secure it is. You don’t want the site getting cracked and being filled with porn or warez.

It’s also worth checking the bandwidth and space requirements so that you can check your own hosting is sufficient. As a general rule, take any current requirements and add 50% to give yourself room for the site to grow.

What maintenance does the site need?

Find out how often the current owner updates the site. Find out what they do and ensure that you can carry on doing it. For example if the site is a tech blog, make sure you can continue to write posts at the same frequency as the current owner.

What handover can you expect?

Are you going to have a period of time where both of you are running the site? Perhaps negotiate a handover period where the old owner can help you to get up to speed.

Conclusion

So there are some important questions to ask about the site before you consider making an offer or paying for a site. It’s a good idea to ask questions well before money changes hands, otherwise you might get lumbered with a worthless site! Hopefully these tips should help you from avoid being scammed too.

If you have any more tips, please add them via the comments below.