We’re not going to mention any names, list any websites or tell you who it was, but recently we received an enquiry from a nice young chap asking us to try and sell his website. Big direct traffic, big social following, profit made, interesting niche..
But after two seconds on the website we could smell something just wasn’t right. I find a super quick start is head over to the socials, have a quick look over the Facebook / twitter / Instagram / google plus pages and see what’s going on.
20,000 Likes on Facebook. Really?!
Facebook. 20,000+ likes, yet a shoddy cover image, bad links out to spammy affiliate pages and just a general state of untidiness. 20,000 likes, but scrolling down the wall page there was literally no interaction – maybe an average of 2 or 3 likes per post. 2 to 3 likes per post is NOT acceptable for 20k ‘likers’, actually impossible. I’d expect more interaction from 20 ‘likers’, let alone 20 thousand.
Whoah there.
I stopped there. Went back to the website had a look around. Still not convinced at all. Got through to the seller on the phone again a little later and quizzed him about the traffic, tens of thousands of visits from mostly direct or referral sources. Hmnn. Really? “Oh, yeah, some guy in America gave me the traffic” #facepalm
So there you go, on paper it looked good. Big traffic and big socials, but everything can be faked, everything can be bought – for literally nothing. It just must be duping people day in day out, and we’re not going to stand for it!
Common signs
- Large amounts of social media followers, but very little interaction.
- Large amounts of traffic, from one or two unqualified sources – usually direct or single referrer.
- Badly organised affiliate links – no care in placement or design
- Bad backlink profile
Other signs of sites that perhaps aren’t really with the end user in mind:
- Too much adsense.
- No thought to design and images
- Bad layout structure, too spammy looking
- Bad navigation structure
Obviously just one of those points don’t necessarily mean a site is doomed to sell, it’s more a case of the more negative points there are the less likely it is to sell, or less likely we’ll even list it. There are plenty of other sites on the internet that’ll sell these kind of sites.
How we can help
Here at The Website Brokers, we offer a personal service – we want to speak to you whether your buying or selling, physically speaking on the phone is a major way to assess the trust and authentic of a buyer or seller, and a part we take very seriously.
If you are buying a site from us you can rest assured that we have had detailed interaction(s) with the seller, and have gone through our exhaustive checklist to try and verify and authenticate both the seller and the online asset in question. We appreciate it’s a hard process, which is why we offer our service. Anyone can list a site up for sale, but without a decent 3rd party to act as an independent specialist you just can’t rely on one sided data. We have over a decade of experience each, from across a magnitude of niches and businesses.
We use the latest industry tools to verify and check. #Trust
We use a number of industry standard tools, software and services to verify and asses. It’s not just us, it’s thorough and big data tools. We try and cover all bases. We want you to get a genuine site. We’re not interested in the spammy stuff.
Do you want to buy or sell a website?
If you’re interested in buying or selling a website in the UK, please don’t hesitate and get in contact with us today. We can offer you a website valuation if you are looking to sell, or give you more details on a website you may have seen for sale.
Image credit – Used under CC License: r2hox
