These days readymade websites are sold on various auction sites including Flippa. While the rule to purchasing anything related to domain is the same as the rules for buying expired domains, there is need of extra precaution since, unlike expired domain, it is a “buy-sell” deal and peoples can rip off you. Indeed, many of the lower-priced websites remain unsold.
It is not that all of these deals are designed to rip off. The sole purpose to buy an existing website or an expired domain is to avoid Google’s sandbox. Back in 2004, professionals noticed that their new websites are not ranking well on Google for the first few months. From that observation, it is taken for granted that a one-year-old website/domain will not rank well on Google SERP. Buying an existing website or an expired domain avoids this unofficial system. Two things you should keep in mind – Google may not help to continue the same performance of a domain after transfer and we have no way to know the actual Page Rank. The above sentences are for alarming you. Investing $100 to $1000 should give you some return.
What to Check to Buy a Website
A website like ours will cost huge to acquire. You’ll rarely get a genuine DA 50+ authority site with traffic for a little $200. The reason is simple – it is rare for any webmaster to ignore a money-making site. You’ll get something which does worth your invested money. The websites which are sold within the $200 price tag are either “readymade websites” for selling purposes or the webmaster could not make enough money from them.
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Moz Domain Authority : Without a good Domain Authority, you’ll neither get enough money from sponsored content nor the published articles will get higher on SERP.
But, Moz Domain Authority must match with the Authority Score calculated by SEMRush. You can check our website or any “normal blog” to get the meaning. A domain with natural backlinks can not have a Domain Authority of 55 and Authority Score of 5. This kind of “mismatch” is alarming.
Traffic : If a website has no measurable traffic on SEMrush report despite a very high DA, then it is alarming for blackhat link building, Google’s penalty etc. Apart from SEMRush, you can use this tool to guess about penalties:
1 | https://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/ |
Backlinks : I will never buy a website with a lot of 301 redirection backlinks and Chinese backlinks. I can not provide you with data-based proof but I will emphasize buying a website/domain with some creditable natural links. Creditable natural links may be from StackExchange like standard Q&A sites or other authority blogs.
Good websites with creditable natural links do get penalized by Google. It is better not to buy a dubious domain.
AdSense Ban : Ban by AdSense is often the first step to clean out from Google SERP. AdSense and Google Analytics can guess what the webmaster is doing with content. How you can understand AdSense has banned a domain? There is no foolproof way although you may check via some tools for the AdSense ban.
Content : The website should have some Google indexed content.
Final Words
For a $100 to $200 investment, it is incorrect to expect a great design, SEO optimized theme, beautiful logo, all social media accounts.
