Assessing a Website during Pre-Purchase

I have stumbled upon a potential gem related to my niche and I am in discussions with the owner (a non webmaster, non techy hobbyist ) with a potential purchase.

I can see the site gets a lot of traffic (estimated at 550k UUs p/month) but it is being very poorly monetized.

In advance of an offer I want to assess the real value of the site.

It has age - 7 years old and has the following stats - DA 31, TF 13, CT, 31.

I have ran it through some free link checkers and discovered it has links from some big sites like buzzfeed and cosmopolitan.com

Question - I don't think I have found all the links linking in to the domain - what do you guys use?

Finally - is there anything else I should be investigating as part of the pre purchase due diligence?

Cheers!

The most obvious thing you need to ask for is access to analytics. 3rd party traffic estimators are notoriously unreliable and tell you nothing about where the traffic comes from and how they engage with the site. If he doesn't have analytics installed, ask for access to server logs.

Already on it, but thank you.

I'd do some form of overlook on something like SEMRush that can show a fairly comprehensive look at the current rankings. Are there lots at the bottom of page 1 and on page 2 for non-optimized pages for terms with decent volume?

Those are the type you can nearly immediately boost with some on-page tweaks and interlinking and get a ton more traffic. Obviously you'll want to boost earnings so you're not waiting the length of the monthly multiple you pay.

I'd ask if there is an email list, which could be key in boosting you to profitability fast.

Are there social profiles with any traction and can you obtain ownership of those?

Is there Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics you can be added to and take over?

http://wiredinvestors.com/website-due-diligence-the-best-resources/

*Yes I work at Wired, it's still a great resource.

got access to analytics and my suspicions were confirmed....

This site is made of gold but it is currently covered in dust and crap.

The traffic is legit, the history is legit and it is totally unmonetized bar some poor adsense placements.

By repositioning the ads I reckon I could easily increase RPMs by around 30%+

SEMRush is seriously under shooting the traffic. I have seen this on other sites before but not to this extent.

By a factor of 10 almost...

Now to buy this damn thing.....

So i got Ahrefs to analyze the backlink profile and it doesnt show me major links that are pointing at the site from sites like buzzfeed, diply, cosmo, etc.

These links show up in alexa...

What gives?

MrMedia said:

SEMRush is seriously under shooting the traffic. I have seen this on other sites before but not to this extent.

Click to expand...

Does the site get most of the traffic from Search Engines? Because Semrush is really only taking those into account.

yes it does.

turtle said:

Does the site get most of the traffic from Search Engines? Because Semrush is really only taking those into account.

Click to expand...

MrMedia said:

So i got Ahrefs to analyze the backlink profile and it doesnt show me major links that are pointing at the site from sites like buzzfeed, diply, cosmo, etc.

These links show up in alexa...

What gives?

Click to expand...

Their indexes are limited. They all are, in different ways too. My site has links from Time.com, for instance, that Ahrefs hasn't found but Majestic has, etc. They don't have nearly the crawling capacity of Google.

If they are sending traffic and the site had Google analytics, and these big sites have sitemaps and RSS feeds and ping the aggregators then you can be assured Google knows about them. Heck, find the exact pages and see if they are indexed. In the end, as long as Google crawled them and added it to the link graph, you're good. Even better if they manage to send traffic.

- Never rely on GA.
- All of that traffic can be faked to the point where it looks 100% real.
- Under monetized doesn't always mean just that; the traffic could be pure shit. See above.
- Big name links can be easily acquired. (Esp before a sale) Not a a sign of trust anymore.
- Backlink #'s can be inflated/garbage.

MrMedia said:

SEMRush is seriously under shooting the traffic. I have seen this on other sites before but not to this extent.

By a factor of 10 almost...

Click to expand...

That's a giant red flag for me. I mean HUGE... (Unless they have a STRONG social following where engagement is obviously authentic.) I'd pass. Their not 100% accurate for every keyword, but if their volume report doesn't follow suit with the trend in GA reported traffic it's clear what's really going on.

Go look at their Webmaster Tools index + search impressions. That will tell another story. If they don't have that, it's yet, another hard pass.

Look the top 10 places that are sending them traffic. Does it appear legit? Can that channel really send them that much volume? If they have 10,000 visitors a month from Reddit and only one link has been shared with 4 upvotes... You get the point.

MrMedia said:

So i got Ahrefs to analyze the backlink profile and it doesnt show me major links that are pointing at the site from sites like buzzfeed, diply, cosmo, etc.

These links show up in alexa...

What gives?

Click to expand...

If you have access to the analytics you should be able to see the exact referral page for those links if you go back far enough, then go to the page and see if the link exists.

Update time.

Firstly, thanks guys for all the great feedback especially @contract and @Ryuzaki

On SEMRush - I know it seems weird and a redflag but it all checked out. SEMRush discounts my traffic from organic search by around a factor of 5 and I know my site is legit. Just never seen it to that extent before.

I had cold approached this person because I wanted to pitch the idea of buying it off them. The site was 1995 style and more of a hobbyist in the niche type of deal so I am 100% there was no frauding going on.

The analytics backed out and I there was a serious lack of tech know how going on behind the scenes.

I made an offer that was x2 annual profit but was flat out rejected in the end.

I was really bummed about this because I can see the massive potential in the site for some quick wins and some really fast revenue however it just wasn't to be.

The owner would prefer to keep the "security" of the monthly income forever more... lol.

So now I am briefing my content team to attack this niche hardcore.

The niche and SERPs are extremely soft and ripe for the taking so I reckon in around 6-9 months I should be pulling some serious traffic out of this sub niche and definitely competing hardcore for those rankings.

I guess that will be a time when the owner of the site comes crawling back begging me to buy.

And I might....

But at a 20% of my original offer