Webmastering & Design

Difficulties and Risks Buying Established Websites

Many webmasters prefer to create and build websites then add the content which is the hardest part, if we are talking from a view that we need high quality content that would attract visitors and search engines, and finally it comes another hard task which is to optimize and promote the website in the search engines. This task that can be a kind of easy if we have a good quality content available. Otherwise, there are other webmasters who prefer to buy established websites with or without traffic and revenue, websites that are ready to use and to market in order to provide information or services in exchange of something ( revenue from ads, sales, leads.. ). Whatever, in this post I’ll try to list some problems that would face you if you are trying to buy a website:

Dealing with a CROOK

A lot of sites are available for sale everyday, there are a lot of forums and market places where you can find thousands of websites that you can buy. The price of the website will depend on the quality, traffic and revenue that it generates, BUT you don’t have to trust everyone who says that my website makes $$$ per month or receive thousands of visits everyday.. My advice is not to buy a website based on this data, try to look for the site archive, check if the domain is dropped, check Page Rank, backlinks, Alexa rank.. Anything that can show you the real value and how much this site is worth!

Transfer your new site

When you’ll buy a website from someone, in 90% of the cases he’ll give you the site files and you have to transfer the site to your new hosting account if you paid for a new hosting plan. This is not an easy task, especially if you bought a large website, it will take time to transfer files to new server. You may ask the support to move the site for you but ‘be sure’ about the fact that they will ask you for the login information for the other host where the site is originally hosted so that they can download the backup and upload it again, which is not possible all the time.

Losing reputation

All the time and when buying an established website, you have to take in consideration that a niche that make $1000 per month can make only $100 in the next month, especially that when moving from server to server a website can lose ranking in search engines or what we call SERPs if it is transferred to a new IP class, visitors because of the downtime that you will expect when moving and also revenue as a keyword that pays $3 today can pay only $1 tomorrow.

All of this is based on my personal experience, you may have been in luck better than me and grabbed a nice deal but all what I want to let you know is to be careful and study the market and conditions before taking a new decision of buying a website, it’s real business. Did you faced any of these difficulties? Did you faced other problems when trying to buy an established website? Share with us!

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4 Comments

  • Reply
    Gary
    October 28, 2009 at 18:12

    Great Post.

    Buying web sites can be risky if you do not find out and research some information about the site. It’s very important to know everything about the site your buying.

  • Reply
    Tepoy
    October 29, 2009 at 14:29

    Thanks for the post I really need to know this. It’s very informative and very helpful.

  • Reply
    stephaine
    October 30, 2009 at 19:52

    As a Newbie, I am always searching online for articles that can help me. Thank you

  • Reply
    Gatey
    November 16, 2009 at 19:14

    I’ve really enjoyed reading your articles. You obviously know what you are talking about! Your site is so easy to navigate too, I’ve bookmarked it in my favourites 😀

  • Leave a Reply to Gary