This article is going to evaluate the important factors and takes a look at several other - lesser important - factors as well. A potential buyer needs some knowledge to be able to calculate a price for a website in the same manner that someone who has knowledge about cars will fair better when purchasing a car than someone who does not know anything about cars.

Technical knowledge, as in programming languages, is not that important when buying websites. They only have to be considered in some special cases, for instance when buying a web application. A buyer needs knowledge in SEO and website monetization among other things to evaluate a website.

SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, in a broader sense of the word. This includes analysing the traffic of the website and analysing the potential to increase that traffic. Main aspects of this analysis are the traffic sources and other factors like domain and website age or if the website is an authority in its niche.

The most important factor in this area is traffic. Buyers have to avoid several mistakes that are easily made when looking at traffic stats, they are:

• Measuring Traffic: Which tool / script has been used to measure the traffic ? If you look at the available scripts (some popular ones are Google Analytics, AWStats, Perfomancing and Webalizer) you will notice that each will come up with a completely different figure for Uniques, Pageviews and Hits even though they all analysed the same website.

  It is extremely important to know how a script measures traffic, the difference can be 100% and more depending on the tools used to measure traffic.

• Traffic Sources: The source of the traffic is of uttermost importance. The most valuable traffic is coming from search engines when monetization is concerned. Search Engine traffic is reliable and you can be sure that it will not drop to nothing in a matter of days unlike other traffic sources, say Stumbleupon or Social Media Site traffic.

  A rule of thumb is the higher the search engine traffic the better. Everything else is not reliable and can be easily manipulated.

• Age:Domain age and website age are two important factors. They are not the same. The age of the domain has nothing to do with the age of the website. A website could have been created recently on a domain that was registered ten years ago.

  Some scammers like to purchase dropped aged domains with Pagerank and sell those domains for a hefty sum to unknowing buyers. The domains will most likely lose the Pagerank during the next Pagerank Update. The statistics of a website and external websites, like archive.org, can help to determine the age of a website.

• Keywords and authority: While this is not the most important aspect it is still nice to know. The traffic that comes from the search engines is the most reliable and most important factor. Knowing from which keywords that traffic comes can be important when evaluating growth potential.

Monetization:

Analysis of the current monetization techniques on the website and the potential of the website to increase the revenue. A solid overview of the different monetization strategies, advertisers and practical experience is absolutely recommended. Most websites sell for6-24 times the monthly revenue depending on the time the website has earned that amount, the type of website and the sources of the revenue.

I think we can all agree that private ad sales are probably not a very reliable revenue source. I would divide revenue sources therefor in reliable and unreliable ones.

• Reliable Revenue Sources: The reliable revenue sources are those that depend on traffic mainly. So basically every CPC and CPM based ad on the website is reliable. It is highly unlikely that the revenue from these sources will change in a short period of time. I’m not saying it cannot happen because some factors do play a role here. If the seller was using shady tactics to generate the revenue, e.g. placing ads in a way that was against the TOS of the advertising provider, then the reliable source could yield to provide revenue at all.

  One also has to take the traffic sources into consideration. CPM ads benefit from social media traffic in a greater way than CPC ads do. Running a Stumbleupon campaign can drive lots of traffic to a website that generates CPM revenue.

• Unreliable Revenue Sources: Everything that is not providing regular monthly payments or is independent of traffic levels. This includes Pay Per Post, selling Text Links, private ad sales and even to a lesser extent affiliate programs. All of those can be gone in a second.

  It does not have to be that way necessarily but it can happen. Affiliate sales could be a reliable revenue source if the seller can provide solid stats for a long time period and has not generated them by buying traffic. All those unreliable revenue sources have two things in common: They can bring in revenue but they do not have to. Even if the seller made x Dollars per month from paid postings or selling text link ads it does not mean that this will continue.

Revenue that is generated from Adsense or CPM networks is also a good indicator of the traffic a website receives. It’s possible to compare figures with related websites of the same niche for instance.

It is important to know if the domain or account had been banned previously by advertising companies. If you see optimization potential in a domain because it is not running Adsense and increase your bid because of that then you better be sure that you can run Adsense on that domain. I always ask the seller to clarify this, why he is not using Adsense on the website.

Other:

Everything else that is important to find a value for a website. This does include the niche of the website. A buyer who does not know anything about Photoshop would be hard pressed to run a Photoshop blog. He would rely on professional writers to write content for the website which would reduce the monetary gain from the website.

This also includes costs for servers, websites, administrators, legal fees and everything else that might be necessary to run a website.

Most sellers do not post information about the monthly costs of a website openly and only respond in private to such questions. A website that is earning $1000 per month could be a nice catch but would it be still a bargain if you knew that you had to pay $200, $500 or $800 per month to generate that $1000 ?

Time is another important factor. How much time is needed to run the website. That’s an important question. The best websites are sit and earn websites, those sites that you setup and do not need to administrate or create content for afterwards other than checking the earnings from time to time.

Time is money in this case. Would you rather earn $4000 per month from eight blogs that require eight hours of daily work or the same amount from eight websites that require eight hours of work per month ?

I was not really sure where to add Pagerank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank. I do not think that they are completely useless like some other bloggers but they should not be overrated either. It’s easy to achieve a Pagerank of up to 5 in a couple of months depending on the updates of the Google Datacenters. Higher Pageranks are harder to come by and this can be an indication of authority site. It means something if a website has had a Pagerank of 7 for more than two years for instance.

I usually do not care about Pagerank between 1-5 and start my research on websites with Pagerank 6+. Alexa and Compete are only guidelines. A website with a Compete Rank of 0 or an Alexa Rank of nine-million could be an indication of a scam if the seller claims the site is receiving 20K users per day.

Factors that do not play a role:

Some factors should not play a role when determining the value of a website. The amount of feed subscribers for example is a popular reason to demand a high price for a blog if the blog has many of them. The problem with feed subscribers however is that they subscribed to the blog for a reason; And that reason is normally because they like what the previous owner writes.

Now it may be that it is possible to switch from one author to another fluently without loosing to many subscribers but that is normally hard to accomplish. A coupon blog could be fine but one where someone writes reviews, gossip or daily life ? The consequence more often than not is a reduction in feed subscribers from the point on when the blog is sold and a new author takes over.

Design, graphics and the like are another factor that should not play a role normally. Some sellers claim they paid thousands of Dollars for the design. The important question however is how much you would be willing to pay for it. If you think that design is worth $100 instead of $2000 then say so and use that figure in your calculations. A good looking blog is nice but most visitors, especially those from search engines, visit a blog because they are looking for information, not because they are looking to find a blog with a great design.

Conclusion

I hope I brought up some valid points that help you determine the proper value of a website. You still need lots of knowledge in certain key areas to successfully appraise a website. One of the services that I’m offering is website evaluation. If you are interested in further information contact me.

Whenever I tried to change the DNS setttings I received the message: The Total DNS Control Manager for this domain is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later. which was worrying me. It took me two days to figure out why this was happening all the time. First I thought it was a problem at Godaddy and that waiting would solve it.

It did not change for two days and I decided to look at other possibilities. I realized quickly that it was related to cookies. I use a deny all cookies unless I have permitted them explicitly extension in Firefox. What I did not realize in the beginning was the fact that Godaddy redirected the request from their own domain to a secureserver.net domain. And cookies were not permitted for that second domain.

I quickly added that domain to the list of permitted websites and was able to edit the DNS entries in Total DNS Controls from then on again.

The usual process was to visit a directory, navigate to the category that you wanted to place your link in and click on a link on that page to submit your website. Some websites required you to create an account first, some to purchase the listing and others to put a reciprocal link on your website.

You had to enter lots of details about your website like site title, description, category and keywords but also personal information like email, username and password in a form and it really was a boring process that took really long for each directory even if you did make use of copy and paste.

Directory Submitter was advertised by Vic who is running his website Blogger Unleashed and I thought to give it a try. I thought it would be a fully automated software which it is not, more about this later.

The software costs about $70 and gives you the option to buy Keyword Elite and SEO Elite for 50% off after the purchase.

Once you start Directory Submitter you are prompted to create a first project. A project basically contains the information about one website that you want to submit to the directories.

You add all those information that directories request once. This includes personal information as well as Titles, Keywords and Descriptions. Yes that is right, you can add more than one in each field to add variety and avoid duplicate content.

Directory Submitter offers a list of about 2200 directories after updating the list of available directories online which consist of paid and free directories. There is unfortunately no information if a free directory requires a reciprocal link or not and no way to create those from within the software.

Several directories are not working anymore and it takes some time to kick those from the list.

The process to submit a site to a directory is still manual. The program comes with a browser that is used to navigate the websites and find the submit url link. The data is entered automatically most of the time except for the category and captcha. Directories that require a login before submission are taking the longest to submit to because you need to enter additional information and normally confirm your email.

Directory Submitter saves you the time to fill out those information manually but that’s pretty much it. I really had hopes that this software would automate the process a bit more. Don’t get me wrong you save time and the manual approach has some advantages like being able to edit the information that are automatically entered in the form for instance or picking the right category.

While you save time you will still be busy submitting your website(s) to those directories. My estimation is that it takes at least 5-6 hours to go through the list once even if you only select the free directories.

I did remove all the directories that would lead to a 404 from the list to speed up things the next time I would run a new project in the software.

It is possible to add new directories to the software which is definitely nice but also lots of work. I guess Directory Submitter is a nice software if you submit to directories regularly. It does save time and that’s the main advantage of the software. If you only submit to directories once or twice a year you might consider this carefully since a directory submission at some webmaster forums can be bought for roughly $10.

Although that is not possible yet I would like to introduce two plugins that change several elements of the new Wordpress 2.5 admin interface. One is a new theme that can be used instead of the two available ones and the other makes use of the full width of the screen instead of just 80% or even less depending on the monitor resolution.

Admin Big Width:

This plugin sets the width of the admin interface to 100% which means that it is finally possible to make use of the full screen resolution.

JP Admin StylishBlue

Did you know that you can change the default Wordpress 2.5 admin theme to a classic theme in your user profile ? This plugin adds another theme that can be chosen in the same menu.

The major change in this version of Wordpress is obviously the interface which was overhauled completely. The layout, colors and menus are different and it takes a while to get used to this new interface. I would compare it to updating from Windows XP to Windows Vista which in my opinion was nothing more than a graphical update.

I have spotted two new features that I like. The first is the new picture uploader which makes it possible to upload multiple pictures at once. It seems to be incompatible with several plugins though and I had to disable the Popularity plugin to get the uploader to work at all.

The second which is probably even more important is the ability to edit the permalink before it is being published. It is possible to have different titles and permalinks which was not possible before.

The list of features that I do not like is a little bit longer unfortunately. The new layout may look nice but it’s using a huge font size in my opinion. I was able to reduce the font in my browser permanently.
The biggest problem for me, layout wise, is the amount of white space. I use a resolution of 1280×1024 and about a fifth of the screen is unused which becomes even more when writing posts.

Some important menus however are in a position on the screen where they do not make sense at all. Talking about categories for instance. Why on earth do they have to be below the fold and in a tiny menu that one has to scroll a dozen times because it displays only six categories at once. Imagine a blog with 50+ categories.

While we are at it. Tags are implemented in a way that could be described as complicated. I have been using the Simple Tagging Plugin which had a feature that would auto-suggest tags that I have been using previously. This feature is gone, probably not the fault of the Wordpress developers, hopefully the plugin author will enable it again.

Comment Moderation has changed as well. I did moderate quite a few comments on one of my blogs that were already moderated. You get those handy delete or mark as spam buttons that affect all checked comments. I thought I was in a menu that was displaying only comments awaiting moderation but in reality I was in the menu that displayed all my comments.

I ended up deleting several legit comments on my blog. It’s kinda strange that a click on the number that is displaying over the Comments link does not lead directly to the comments awaiting moderation menu. It’s another click that leads to it from that main menu.

Wordpress is widget ready right ? Why don’t they make the admin pages widget ready as well ? It would be really cool if you could move the menus around, e.g. move the Categories menu back in the old place and make it display more entries at once. Wordpress should by default use the full screen width and not a standard 1024 width which it seems to be using for everything that is not in the header.

It’s always nice to be the first to write about a certain topic because that gives you a head start in the race for the best search engine position and makes it more likely that other blogs and websites link to your story when writing about the topic.

I would like to share one of my secrets on how you can be the first, or among the first. In theory every cool site, article or tool makes it sooner or later on bookmarking websites like Delicious. When you look at the Delicious user base you notice that some users tend to be the first to discover great stuff, those are the ones that are the first to bookmark.

Delicious offers user based RSS feeds. So, all you need to do is connect the pieces of this puzzle and locate users who are publishing news items of your niche before the others. Subscribe to those user feeds and you will be in for a head start, more often than not.

This can be quite frustrating for webmasters who try to analyse the rank of their website in the Google search engine. Fluctuations can occur daily and it can - more often than not - be attributed to results that are retrieved from different datacenters. Other possibilities are changes in the Google algorithm or a change in the backlinks of a related website.

The easiest way to check Google rankings in multiple datacenters is to use a script that does that. That sounds to easy, right ?

The Google Datacenter Watch Tool can do that for instance. It gives you the option to retrieve data from more than 700 Google Datacenters. Not all at the same time, it is usually displaying the results of ten datacenters. The first one hundred search results can be displayed.

1. Placing ads beneath titles that make the user believe they are not ads but site content

Google Adsense units are not to be placed directly beneath misleading titles that make users believe they are related to the content of the website. This is just a clarification of the rule that says that you may not use titles that say “Click Here”, “Help us by” and similar ones that ask the user to click on the links.

So “Hot Deals”, “Business Opportunities” and similar headings are forbidden as well.

2. Ads have to be distinguishable from surrounding content

I think that this is the interesting clarification. I know a lot of websites that are using link units in their navigation that appears to be part of the navigation. According to the blog post this is no longer allowed.

It is also not allowed to add an Adsense unit in a way that it could be considered content from that website. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how this could look like.

The Adsense team recommends to change the color of the Ad units in such a case so that they are clearly distinguishable.

Even if you assume that those are all real and not photoshoped you still know nothing about the method that has been used to generate that revenue. Don’t fall into the trap and start believing all that is said by that guy only because he uses this technique to make everyone say “I want that check, too”

The most important thing that you need to understand when visiting Make Money blogs is that you need to use your brain. The first question that I’m asking myself when reading an article that seems to tell everyone how to make a lot of cash online is about the connection between the author and the method described.

If the author has no experience with that method or service other than writing about it I don’t believe in it.
If the author earns money by referring you to some service that you have to purchase I don’t believe in it unless he uses the services by himself.

Let me give you a real example. I’m lately listening to a lot of Video Casts by Vic and his blog Blogger Unleashed and he is using affiliate links for a variety of tools like Bookmarking Demon or Bans. But those links are not just pasted beneath his posts, he is actively using the services and writing / talking about them on his blog. From what he is saying about them you know that he knows them in and out and uses them because he believes in the product. If you look around on his blog you see that he refers to those products constantly not to make you buy them but because this is what he uses to make money. (not saying that he is a saint but he does deserve the money if you buy them due to his recommendations)

Bad examples would be bloggers who publish reviews (paid or not) about products that they do not use by themselves to make money. Products that they know are fishy like Agloco for instance.

If you visit make money online blogs and analyze the product recommendations you will come up with two types of blogs. The ones that are putting affiliate links on everything without using those services by themselves. Those blogs are a waste of time in my opinion.

You will also stumble upon several blogs that are different, that write with a passion about products because they are using them, they know them and they make money with them. Those blogs are the goldmines and you should closely follow them.

Delete the other ones from your feed readers and bookmarks, they are not worth it.

New keywords are a great way of expanding the traffic to your website. You might even stumble upon keywords that you have not thought about in the beginning or that would make an excellent niche blog in its own rights. I did check the statistics for my Baby Phat Shoes website and discovered several new keywords that I have added to the rank checker (Web CEO) that I’m using.

Most of these new keywords have been added by writing articles that cover a specific topic in that niche. One of my first posts for instance was about Baby Phat Sandals and I’m currently ranking 15th in Google for that term and even discovered some long tail keywords where i was ranking better.

The website finally started ranking in Yahoo as well which will surely drive some traffic as well to my blog in the long run. I’m going to continue writing for the website concentrating on product related articles that will rank well for those terms. It is also time to start a link building campaign to push the rankings for the keywords that will drive good traffic to my website. More on some of the techniques that I’m going to implement later.