Buying Long Established Websites On The Cheap
by Matt on May.02, 2007, under Web Development
I was chatting to Nate a few weeks ago about an idea I had for buying established websites on the cheap. The premise was pretty simple, I’d use Google to try to find sites that were put up for sale by their owners informally through an announcement on their website.
For example if you do a Google Search for “take over this site” you are presented with 570 results, some of which are pages that have annoucements stating that the website in question is up for sale. The reason why I’ve used “take over this site” rather than “this site is for sale” is that “take over this site” implies that money isn’t in question, the owners will often be willing to transfer the site over to you for a nominal fee providing you gain their trust (which is the hard part, after all they don’t want to see all of their hard work ruined by a babbling, incompetent lunatic who wipes everything and places ads everywhere.).
Let’s assume that you’ve found a website that you like that’s still available. You can increase your chances of acquiring the site if you can prove that you’re passionate about the site’s subject area. It’ll help to have existing websites in this particular niche that you can forward on to the site’s owner. A better approach would be to visit DMOZ and scour the niche directories for out of date yet popular websites that correlate with your interests.
For example I could visit the Dmoz Farting category and look for pages that haven’t been updated in the past few years and ask if they are interested in handing over their website in exchange for some money. Your chances of a successful handover are increased dramatically if the owner is unaware of the value of their site. You can gain a fair impression of whether this is the case or not by simply analysing their pages. If the site is well designed and features some variety of ad links then the chances of the creator handing over the site are remote since they are probably aware that there website is worth at least something.
Ideally the website should look horrendous, have no ads but a lot of content and backlinks. DN Scoop is your friend here.
Of course, part of the fun is typing in keyword phrases that webmasters will use to signal their disinterest with their current site. Here are a few ideas that return 50 or more results in Google.
And finally an extra special bonus search term..
So far I’ve made about 5 email enquiries with no success. Have any of you tried this before? Do you think it’s ethical? How would you respond if someone asked you to hand over one of your old websites for next to nothing?
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Hello. Welcome to Take More Risks which is my blog related to web development and making money on the internet. I now update my blog approximately 4-5 times a week and look forward to advancing my knowledge of both of the topics above with you.
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May 3rd, 2007 on 8:00 am
Sounds like a fantastic idea, hunting down old websites and renovating them. You get aged domains, existing (aged) backlinks, no sandbox issues.
Keep plugging at it, you’ll eventually get someone who’ll be interested in transferring a domain over to you.
I’ve gotta hand it to you Matt, you’re a bloody genius…
May 3rd, 2007 on 9:00 am
This is some real good advice. Good luck on your endeavor. I bet using this you can find some real strong diamonds in the rough.
May 3rd, 2007 on 1:40 pm
Sounds like a good plan. I guess there could be a moral blindspot here somewhere, but it’s not that big. I rarely find issue with separating a fool from his money anyhow. Good luck.
May 3rd, 2007 on 3:28 pm
I’m not sure it’s really a moral blindspot - these are folks with dead websites. Sure, you’ll maybe make money down the line, but not without a fair amount of work to resurrect the site. That’s work the original owner wasn’t willing to put in.
In some respects, they may be glad to be rid of the site.
May 3rd, 2007 on 4:15 pm
What a great article! I am getting sick of the rubbish I see for sale over at the SitePoint marketplace and had never even considered the methods you suggest in this post.
- Martin Reed
May 4th, 2007 on 8:04 pm
If you are fortunate enough to enjoy some top serp positions for your keywords then you should contact the webmasters for the other sites on the first serp page.
I have the top two results for one of my terms and just picked up the site with numbers 4 and 5. In this case, the owner of the site lost interest and never monetized the site.
There are zillions of old sites out there that rank well in the serps for long tail keywords, but have not been touched in years.
Another sure sign of a potential seller is if the site still looks like the day it was created, typically in the late 1990s. We have all seen these sites: flashing gifs, obnoxious colors, 100% fluid widths, outdated html tags, etc.
My dream is to own page one of the serps for some of my favorite terms.
May 6th, 2007 on 7:40 pm
Matt, post again if you have any success with this method. I’ve tried it in the past when I’ve come across dead sites that were in my niche, but haven’t ever found anyone to follow through with a deal.
February 5th, 2008 on 12:46 am
This is a great idea, one I’m going to try.
Also on old domains, I bought a domain for a local community site last year. It had been used before and when I checked the back links I discovered it had about 2 dozen PR 2 and 3 links pointing to it! Once I had uploaded my new website it was indexed in no time.