Buying Sites For SEO – Forget the debate over buying links. How about buying entire web sites to gain success in search. This session looks at how to find the gems out there, criteria to consider, ways to negotiate and how to best leverage your new purchase. Tips, tricks, success stories, and painful lessons learned will be shared.
Moderator: Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Q&A Moderator: Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple
Speakers:
Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI
Todd Malicoat, Internet Marketing Consultant, Stuntdubl
Jeremy Schoemaker, CEO, Shoemoney Media Group
Jeremy Wright, CEO, B5 Media
Jeremy Schoemaker couldn’t make it but pre-recorded a session.
Jeremy Schoemaker
Buying domains for money. There are lots of sites out on the web with expired domains, that government, military, edu sites link to. He built a spider to find these sites. Back in 2004 we were dominating a lot of niche markets with expired domains.
They would register the domain and the set up the site they wanted and then burnout the site. Jeremy thinks the reason for this is the age of the links, not the age of the domains. Sites like this are dying off. I used a Joe Liberman 2004 campaign site and I created a blog for Joe Liberman. After converting the site to a consumer intented site it dropped out of the index. Doing this = bad.
Buying for branding as a keyword domain is a good thing that is probably low risk. Example … fighters.com.
Stephan: Tip a guy was trying to low ball a price for a URL and contacted the owner directly using domain tool and went around moniker.
Jeremy Wright:
Jeremy is giving us some insight into their blogging company. We (b5media) buys sites for revenue potential. They look at traffic, uniqueness, revenue, feed subscribers, etc.
They have a blog evaluator tool. Example Valuations…. to fast for me to explain, but basically, he is sharing the details of the offer that he would have made to acquire the blog.
- Always verify traffic.
- Don’t believe potential
- Don’t deviate from your playbook, but include flexibility
- Avoid personalities.
- Watch out for inflationary schemes.
- Buy early, buy often, admit failure quickly.
We believe in networks, ad networks, consolidations. They are interested in ad networks, partnerships, content models and major blogs.
Jeremy talks fast
Gab Goldenberg
Buying sites for SEO is like climbing Mt. Everest. Talking fast, not much in the deck. I will try and catch valuable items.
Do your research
Use site: search
Protect your investment
Create a trust.
The value you are buying is the domain.
Todd Malicoat
Stuff not to do. The information is really valuable. Carlos told Todd a joke. What is orange and looks really good on a hippy… FIRE.
Finding a old sites:
Think like an old site and use creative queries and automation to help you find the old site.
Contacting Site owners:
- Be Credible
- Be Brief
- Be Lucky
Valuating a Site
A site is worth a dollar more than what you are willing to pay for it. Put time into only really great domains. More bad hippy jokes: How do you starve a hippy: Hide is fathers credit card under a bar of soap. These speakers are harsh.
Disclaimer: I work for a search engine and I am not going to speak definitively on this topic. I will still say stick to the basics and be careful. Don’t do nefarious things. I thought that Jeremy Wrights focus on the business building and purchasing for real potential was brilliant and probably much less risky.
Stephen Spencer has been going through some case studies. I am too tired to do the whole Q and A.