I have been looking around on Flippa.com a lot lately and have notice a bunch of suspect activity. This post is a list of the fishy things I have observed. My hope is that it will serve as a guide to help you if you are thinking about buying a site or using Flippa.com for research.
Follow your gut instincts
If you gut tells you it is a bad idea, you should strongly consider listening. We have intuitions, whether we understand exactly how they happen, that are there to keep us from danger. If we don’t listen, our minds will get caught up in the psychological games the seller is playing and will begin to believe the claims, even if they are far fetched.
Sites age and income reports
A site with very little age is not a complete show stopper, but it is close; unless it is the domain itself that holds the value. I see tons of sites selling for $1000 to $2500 that are only a few months old. The problem with this is you can not be sure if the traffic and income are stable. It doesn’t matter if the traffic is coming from search engines, social media, or a bunch of different sites; if black hat methods were used or the initial traffic was based on a fad, you could lose. Also, it is almost impossible to validate the revenue streams. Many of the sites I see make all kinds of claims, but when potential buyers ask for more details, like analytics and income reports, the sellers make up excuses as to why they can’t provide it or they provide screen shots that could be for multiple sites or doctored.
One example I saw, claimed the site had been up for a few months and they had been making hundreds of dollars each month with Adsense. The problem they suffered from, or at least they claimed, was that their Adsense account had been hijacked and they could no longer run Adsense ads or access the account to get the past reports. This should be an immediate flag that this is probably a scam.
Seller is selling site to move on to bigger projects
I have seen this statement so many times in what I deem to be scam auctions, that I am willing to say, if the auction has the phrase “I am selling this site because I want to focus on bigger and better projects” or something like this, run as fast as you can away from the listing; it is a scam, period. First, I am not saying that it is not legitimate to say you are moving on to bigger things and would like to unload a site to free up some time and get some working capital out of it. What I have observed is this statement is usually the sole reason for selling. It has become the de facto, default, fill in the blank, copy paste way of getting by the question of why the seller is selling the site, and the scammers love it.
Auto-pilot, autoblogging
Buying an auto whatever site can be okay, if it has history, or if it doesn’t, you only pay $200 or less for it. If it has history, then there should be an existing business model that you can follow. This model will more than likely not be based off of search engine traffic, because autoblogs employ plugins that either put syndicated or spun content on the site. These sites do not normally rank high with the content, especially if it is syndicated content. But other methods of creating an audience can be followed to make the site profitable.
The problem I see with the autoblogs is that the sellers make claims of the possibility of future search engine traffic if enough time passes. These auctions are usually for very young sites and make no claims or very little claims of traffic, although, there are some that do the opposite. If you buy a site like this because you think you will get traffic in the future, you will be sadly disappointed. This type of site may serve a purpose in the world, but generally, the people that know what to do with an auto site, know that they can build one in an hour, or they can pay someone a few hundred dollars to set one up.
Claims of traffic
Many of the scam listings claim they have traffic. When you try to verify the traffic it usually doesn’t hold water. Some of these unscrupulous sellers will answer the question of the traffic not matching their claims by saying the traffic has dropped off because they haven’t been working the site recently or posted new content. I own several websites and I have never seen traffic suddenly drop off because I didn’t make post in the past few months. I have seen traffic drop when the search engines change their algorithm and I have seen it drop when a source of traffic dries up, but to say if you make a few more post the traffic will be what it was is very misleading. Usually these sites that had some traffic history for the first few months and it suddenly drops were either participating in some type of black hat techniques and got found out, the traffic was fabricated, or the traffic was from search and their was an algorithm change. The first two are scams and the last, algorithm change, is usually not that easy to recover from unless you know what you are doing. I would only ever consider the traffic drop to be an algorithm change if the site had at least a years worth of history or I knew the market very well.
Quality of inbound links
A site can have links from many different sources, and a good site with a good link profile will normally have a few links from not so good sites. But the good links will far out weigh the bad. Scam listings sometimes, but not always, have a poor link profile. The bulk of the links are from sites that are considered bad neighborhoods. This not always the case, but it is some thing to look at.
Claims of ranking for particular keywords
Anyone can claim they rank for certain keywords in the search engines. A quick check in each of the search engines will reveal the truth. I use a free search engine ranking tool to verify this in the top four search engines.
Take some time and check all of the claims made by the seller. If it doesn’t lineup or feel right, move on; there are plenty more sites to purchase.
Morgan Linton did a really good post on spotting scams on Flippa. You should definitely read it before bidding on anything.