Very first questions to ask when buying a site? First considerations?

[crabfoot]

From crabfoot
(Strongly suggest reviewing his method of prioritizing responses)

That's not a method, and it does not prioritise - it is the start of an ordered flow, the product of a programmer's mind. When I examine a problem, putting things in a particular order leads to a structure which can be ordered into a flow chart or a program. It is a starting point, and could lead to a structured way of assessing sites.

You are looking at the top of a top-down design. The idea of the post is that people will provide other considerations and questions which can lead to the development of a procedure for assessing a site, and its suitability to a purchaser.

If we have that structure, we might be able to extend it pragmatically to getting an idea of market values by comparing derived criteria to sale prices.

I need to LEARN a lot before going forward.

Science is true -don't be misled by facts.

[Clinton]

I want to cut down as much as possible though spending more time than needed on analyzing websites that I ultimately won't buy. I'd like to find out any deal breakers as early in the process as possible....Thus, I was wondering what some of the favorite/ best starting questions to the site sellers are?

If you want to cut down on time waste and weed out sites more efficiently you'll develop the ability at detecting the bad ones even BEFORE you get to asking questions.

Too much hype in the listing; a seller who makes extensive promises of "free" hosting, seo and other services post sale; secret methods of traffic generation that they can't share in the thread etc., are all immediate end-of-story for me. If the seller sounds too full of himself, the site boasts a large percentage of "free" traffic from Google, the seller takes only Paypal .... I'm outta there.

If a site passes all of the above I'd run a few checks on it before asking questions. If it turns out to be part of a seller owned network, the domain is a zombie, it doesn't pass a copyscape etc., etc., I'll move on.

Then there's gut feeling which further eliminates unsuitable sites.

By the time I get to asking questions I know a lot about the site and the questions are specific not just to that business model but to his business.

[mark2000]

Just found this Blog post by Clinton that was helpful to me on this subject as well:
http://experienced-people.net/forums...nds-of-Dollars

For example, a site listed for sale that got most of its traffic from Google looked like a fantastic deal. Fortunately, I had read in a webmaster forum that there was a major Google ranking change that day. After dragging out the discussion for a couple of days to monitor the site's traffic for change, it turned out that the originally stated reason for selling the site may not have been true after all. The seller had noticed his Google traffic had almost completely evaporated and was bailing.

Similarly, changes in PR, a new vulernability to a key platform, changes in the terms and conditions of major programs like CJ or Adsense can all be flags. When Adsense took a strong stand against arbitrage there was a flood of Adsense arbitrage sites on the market - sites that had become adept at buying traffic from Adwords on cheap terms, getting visitors to click on Adsense ads on more expensive terms and making a profit in the bargain. The very fact that Google's terms on a major program had changed was a warning itself. That there was a sudden rush of a particular type of site should have also set some alarm bells ringing. Chitika recently decided to do a manual review of all publisher sites in its network. Should a site come to the market today that earns primarily from Chitika, it doesn't matter if it has a multi-year history of strong profits, the chances are that earnings are going to disappear.

It doesn't matter what the news it, it could still be useful. A Google-slap to a major referrer - or to the main source of a site's PR - could be what sparks some sellers to make for the exit. When Squidoo got a Google slap for all the "lenses" they had on spammy topics, the creators of those lenses soon realised that the ultimate destination sites those lenses were created to benefit were going to be affected, and they started putting those sites up for sale. Great timing for sellers looking to get out of the market, but not so good for the buyers who end up with a site that's never going to perform to the standard demonstrated by all the genuine proof of income and proof of traffic provided.