Buying Websites on eBay

Buying Websites on eBay will help you tell the difference between the good, money making opportunities and the overpriced rubbish which is littering the business categories more and more each day. The guide will reveal to you...

Buying an established website is a great way to own a ready-made web presence. If the website is good you can enjoy the benefit of a strong position in the search engines and capitalise on an instant flow of traffic.
An established website gives you the chance to “jump the queue” as you don’t have to wait months for the search engines to rank you for your chosen keyword and niche.
eBay is becoming an increasingly popular venue for traders to sell their websites because keen buyers looking for an established, profitable website are ready to snap them up.
A quick look at eBay Pulse in the UK and the USA reveals that people are looking for “established”, “profitable” “website” “businesses”.
Unfortunately there are unscrupulous sellers who are listing rubbish and attracting bids of hundreds, if not thousands of pounds for websites not worth a fraction of that amount.
This guide has been created to help you determine what website’s are worth bidding on or purchasing and which one’s are best left well alone.
The guide looks at several aspects of a website that makes it valuable, such as:
• domain name
• content
• search engine position
• revenue
While this is not a definitive list of what makes one website more valuable than another, it should be enough to give you an idea to distinguish behind something worth spending your money on and something worth ignoring.
Domain Name
First of all, does the website on sale even have a domain name?
I have seen plenty of websites being sold for hundreds of pounds which do not have a domain name, meaning you are forking out way over the odds for something which is merely a “template” rather than a unique website.
This means if you want to put the website onto the internet, you will need to purchase a suitable domain name yourself.
Admittedly there is no great expense in doing this, but you should not be paying hundreds of pounds for something that:
• Is not indexed or even acknowledged by any search engines
• Will cost you a lot of time and money before you see any sort of return
• Can potentially be resold countless times by the seller, eliminating any possibility that what you have bought is “unique” in terms of content
• You could have produced yourself for a fraction of the asking price.
That is not to say you should completely ignore “template” websites of this type. If one features a subject you are interested in and can be purchased for under £100 then it can give you a good basis from which to work from and develop yourself further.
If the website you are interested in buying does have a domain name attached then there are some other points to consider and we will look at each of them in turn:
• Age
• What the domain name actually is, e.g.
o Is it a memorable / generic keyword?
o Length
o Whether it contains hyphens
• Google PageRank value
Age
Put simply, older is better. The search engines look more favourably on older domains than freshly registered domain names for competitive subjects.
If the website listing in eBay does not state when the domain name was registered (or if it does and you want to double check) just visit www.whois.sc and type in the name.
Here you will see the exact date the domain name was registered and who by as well as the date of expiry.
Memorable & Generic Keywords
Does the website feature a memorable or generic set of keywords or is it something completely irrelevant to the content of the website?
For example, a website selling PS3 games which has the domain name www.ps3games.com would be more valuable than something like www.welovegames.com.
Both are quite short and memorable, but a website focusing on PS3 games which also features the keywords “PS3 games” in the domain name is a far better choice.
This is because it has better potential to rank higher in the search engines for “PS3 games” type search requests due to it being included in the domain name and also within the website content itself.
The term “PS3 games” is also quite generic, so may even benefit from “type in” traffic. This is where users simply type in a phrase and then suffix into the search bar of their browser to see if a website can fulfil their requirements.
If you think an available domain name is quite generic you can visit and type it in.
For example