Step 2 of the Buying Websites Due Diligence Process – Verifying the Website History
Now that we’ve discussed the step-by-step prcess in checking the website ownership with Step 1 of the buying websites due diligence process, let me continue with Step 2 — how to research the website history. At this point, we try to answer the questions “What should we know about a website’s history?” and “What tools should be considered to do this?”
Verify the Age of the Domain
In domainspeak, the age of the domain is simply how long the domain has been registered. This is vital because most online marketers agree that search engines are more “friendly” towards websites which have been in existence for a longer time. Same as in Step 1, the Whois tool of DomainTools will prove to be very handy as it can give the registration date of a website. Take note however that the domain age is not the same as the website age. The former simply refers to the date when the domain was registered while the latter is the period when the actual website has been in existence.
Frequency of Site Ownership Transfers
Your Whois search can even yield information on the registration history of a domain, particularly on the frequency of ownership transfers. If transfers have been too many and too close for comfort, make some inquiries.
The IP History
After getting the site’s IP address from your Whois search, go to YouGetSignal and do a reverse IP search by entering the Whois IP address. The reverse search will show if the current site owner is actually, hosting the website in question using a shared server, and will even show a list of all other sites hosted by the same server. This may cause issues in the future particularly if the other sites on the server are either porn or spam sites, which can be potentially blocked.
Determining a Website Banned from Search Engines
Determining if a particular website has been banned by a search engine may prove to be tough as you can’t simply find this info in Whois, and there are no hard and fast guidelines for this. If a site is banned or penalized by Google or other search engines like Yahoo or Bing good luck on having it indexed or ranked. If you want to find out if a website is out of favor with search engines, do the following:
Perform a Google search for the www domain, without using the www (e.g. “websites.com” as opposed to “http://www.websites.com”). If the domain shows up in the search results without any hitch, then there’s no ban on the site. If it doesn’t appear in the results, you could be facing a problem with the site. Then, search for “site:www.websites.com” and “site:websites.com”. If no pages turn up in the search, this implies that no pages have been indexed and the site is really blocked.
Is the Website Banned from Affiliate or Ad Networks?
Aside from checking if Google or any other search engine has banned the site, it’s also prudent to check if the site may be banned from any affiliate or ad networks as well. After all, these are your potential sources of income. Ask the current site owner directly or try to inquire from the networks or companies for straight answers.
What’s the Backlink History?
In online marketing, the more backlinks pointing to a site, the more “popular” the website is, which in turn, will result to better search engine rankings. Both quantity and quality backlinks matter, although you’d do best to to put more efforts on quality backlinks, or those from high PR sites. To determine which kinds of backlinks were applied on a site, you can make use of the Yahoo! Site Explorer Tool.
There you have it – the 2nd of several steps in the due diligence process when you are looking to buying websites. These are but some of the tips that can guide you in picking outthe right websites to flip. For the complete list of the Step 2 guidelines, visit us and be on your way to website flipping success!
