Looking for a consultant to help me in buying an online business

[DHM]

Thanks, Clinton. I am looking for a consultant to help me in buying an online business. I emailed the names you listed above. Any other suggestions would be appreciated. There is a book series on the web called How To Buy a Internet Business at a Great Price that may be helpful to readers... I would like to have your view on how Panda has effected things and also, and importantly, what the new ICANN top level domains will do to search engines and search engine web site rankings when they come into being next year... the site I am looking to buy is on the first page of Google now - even after Panda - but it is critical that I get some sense of how things are shaking out as that first page position is obviously a large part of the value.

[Clinton]

That book series you're talking about is written by a friend of mine and to whom I've provided some content on the online business side (his expertise is more in offline businesses.... but, boy, does he know his stuff!) I do recommend his products. He is one of the very few people on the internet who both know what they're talking about on buying businesses and are not out to make a quick buck.

I've written again and again about not buying a site for Google ranking and to price a site based on the fact it could lose all Google traffic tomorrow. That still applies. If the seller is expecting a premium for the fact that his site is on the first page of Google, save yourself a chunk of money on DD and walk out of this deal now.

What price is this site?

[DomainMagnate]

Panda had a significant effect on the content sites. Even with reduced traffic, revenue and prices buyers are afraid to touch them, so demand has dropped a bit. There is a bit of a gamble and more risk here: sites affected by panda might pop back up into the serps to reclaim lost revenue (many content sites lost 50-90% of the traffic in panda), or they might drop back as google clearly stated they don't really like content sites any more.

Personally I can add that I've purchased one content site ($2-3k/month) affected by panda about 6 month ago and the revenue has been quite stable so far, so it's working out very well. But it also had significant traffic from bing and yahoo. If the price is right I'd buy more pandalized sites, but I do think they carry an added risk.

[crabfoot]

I'm driven by other processes right now, so I can't take time to check things out - apologies if I seem to be a bit out of date.

The Panda proposals dribbled out in March/April, but were not fully implemented at the time. The first tweaks to the algorithms were felt almost immediately the announcements were made, but other promised changes took until August to be implemented and felt by other sections of the community.

My advice would be to go back and look at the original statements that Gargyl made about the changes it proposed. See if there's anything in there that has still to be implemented that might affect the site you're thinking of buying.

As I see it, there's not much left that they haven't set in motion, so if the income is currently stable there's no reason to suppose it will drop. OTOH anything that looks like a remote danger might be a lever to get the price down ...

Those new ICANN domains don't look like a threat to the small-time website owner. The prices are enough to put most people off - I'm betting that the takers will be very large corporations that can write off the domain purchases against tax. Yes, there are opportunities for people to walk in and take trade from others, but that is more likely to be "small fish with idea attacks big fish" than "small fish with idea attacks lots of other small fish".

Face it, if you can afford those prices you can afford TV advertising - you might as well think big!