Godaddy traffic stats in auction

salhammers

salhammers

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Ok, so I do consider myself a bit new to the wonderful world of domain buying. But overall I have good enough experience online and have tons of existing websites.

So I wanted to test the accuracy of godaddy traffic stats. I took a punt on a website that according to godaddy had over 80k per month visitors. Before I bid, I ran it through seomoz, Alexa and quantcast to see stats. Not much info but it had a Pr 1 and about 2k index links. This morning the domain gets activated and I threw up a Wordpress site with a 404 redirect and stat press plugin to see stats. So according to godaddy I should get 3k visitors both real and probably a few bots. 6 hours later, nada!

Plus the pr has suddenly dropped to 0.

Someone is playing games methinks
 
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I'm surprised nobody has replied as I think it's an area where someone here has some expertise.

Definitely something is fishy. To go from P1 to P0 in a matter of hours of activating the account. Plus 3 visits, (1 of them was me) when godaddy stats said 87k!!

The good news for me is that the auction bid was under $50 so no bank breaker.

Is this a common issue? I'd hate to think godaddy were cooking the stats :-/
 
I use compete, quantcast and SEOmoz and semrush. But according to godaddy the stats come from their parked page.

So either they are playing games or their stat counter is faulty.

Ps. Today's high visitor account so far .. . 1
 
Think I've stumbled onto something. Yesterday's spider visits 366. Today's so far 800+

Looks like godaddy included spider bots in their traffic estimates.

Total bulls#!t
 
Was this an expired or public auction? I know some sellers send fake traffic whilst having their domain on public auction.
 
Traffic stats are impressions, not unique visitors. Includes impressions from parking page and cash parking pages. Traffic is driven to parking pages by GoDaddy listings. You assumed once the GoDaddy listings disappeared the traffic would remain. You assumed traffic meant unique visitors or even visitors at all; it means page impressions. One visitor could create a lot of page impressions. =)

One should never believe stats provided by any seller unless 3rd party tools confirm the same information. Traffic doesn't fall from the sky; study the backlinks and you can better gauge if any real traffic will continue. With that sort of volume, I'd expect to see authority backlinks with many Social backlinks in high traffic areas.


Believing you can purchase a domain and have instant 80K visitors arriving is a fool's dream. You know what they say about fools and their money...
 
godaddy estimation is not so accurate.try to use estibot for appraisals.Use ahrefs for limited but accurate backlink summary.
Check whether your domain is redirecting a pagerank or something.this could help
 
kvmcable said:
Traffic stats are impressions, not unique visitors. Includes impressions from parking page and cash parking pages. Traffic is driven to parking pages by GoDaddy listings. You assumed once the GoDaddy listings disappeared the traffic would remain. You assumed traffic meant unique visitors or even visitors at all; it means page impressions. One visitor could create a lot of page impressions. =)

One should never believe stats provided by any seller unless 3rd party tools confirm the same information. Traffic doesn't fall from the sky; study the backlinks and you can better gauge if any real traffic will continue. With that sort of volume, I'd expect to see authority backlinks with many Social backlinks in high traffic areas.


Believing you can purchase a domain and have instant 80K visitors arriving is a fool's dream. You know what they say about fools and their money...
Click to expand...

They are soon parted.
Good point. To be honest I'm not too bothered as the money invested was to test the accuracy. Now I know.

Does anyone have any experience of traffic accuracy success with expired domains?
 
I am glad that you actually wrote something on this topic. I think the traffic can be manually entered when you're a premium member because I bought a domain on auction, and it had an ungodly amount of "said" traffic, so I bought it. Well... After I did, same issue. I had 1 to 2 hits per day. I called Godaddy and a support guy told me that it was manually entered.

Does anyone know of this? I am not paying Godaddy to have my domains parked there, so I don't know myself.
 
salhammers said:
It was a Public Auction
Click to expand...

The traffic claims for expired domain auctions, in my experience, has been relatively accurate. I still recommend doing your due diligence with research into the history of any domain you're thinking of acquiring.

Public auctions where large amounts of traffic are involved rarely are truthful, rather the domain owner looking to fleece unknowing folks. Sure there's some generic names that pull in high traffic and some sellers often resell domains with traffic that they picked up on the drop too; however as the common saying goes... If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
 
Last edited:
ezcoms said:
I am glad that you actually wrote something on this topic. I think the traffic can be manually entered when you're a premium member because I bought a domain on auction, and it had an ungodly amount of "said" traffic, so I bought it. Well... After I did, same issue. I had 1 to 2 hits per day. I called Godaddy and a support guy told me that it was manually entered.

Does anyone know of this? I am not paying Godaddy to have my domains parked there, so I don't know myself.
Click to expand...

An answer from GoDaddy in reply to:

How are the traffic estimates produced for domain names on GoDaddy auctions?

The traffic estimates are based off the traffic to domains setup with our CashParking service. Domains that are not setup with our CashParking service or do not receive any traffic, will not have anything displayed in the traffic section.
Click to expand...
 
Here's a Statpress screenshot for the 2 days that this site has been live. Remember, the PR dropped in hours, so we are safe to assume there were some redirects going on.

Secondly, the traffic stats were most likely purchased by the seller and/or also included spider bots in its estimates from godaddy. Check out the spiders over two days
stats.png

So I guess its safe to assume public auctions need a huge 'buyer beware' sticker when we view them.

I'm going to now purchase a reasonably priced expired domain with godaddy auction using the following criteria:

1) Domain age 5 years or older
2) Run a Dmoz check, (not important but helps)
3) Check Google PR, Indexed links and backlinks
4) Waybackmachine to see if has any screenshots from last 5 years, (I'm looking for a previously, real working website)
5) traffic stats if available from godaddy must be 60 and above. No point in this experiment if it gets no recorded pageviews.

May find a nugget . . . maybe not, we'll see but I will report back once I find one, purchase it and get it activated
 
Can anyone comment on Godaddy's traffic estimate in their expired domain auctions?
 
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