Insane auction on Flippa

What I don't understand is this. Auctions that are 4 weeks before end with bidding wars starting on the first day. Then in next day or two reserve is met, which IMO for this one particular auction on Flippa, is too low. A ton of comments are posted... and 10 days from the start the price is twice the reserve and bidding war continues. There are 9 bidders and 144 bids and the auction is 17 days from finishing...

WTF?!

Who in their right mind would start a war so quickly to alert all the rest of the community something is going on? You can wait a day or two before the end like with all the rest of the "normal" auctions, but going hard at it from the day it is listed...

My first thought was ok this is staged. They will push it slowly towards the reserve and then let the last sucker buy it. But when reserve was met a week ago and the push didn't subside... Could there be 3 friends pushing the price up and the 4th sucker will end overpaying. I mean how does Flippa handle auctions when 3 top bidders back out? Does the 4th bidder still get the chance to buy it?

Oh, the auction: search for GUESTPOSTDIRECTORY.COM on Flippa - I am not allowed to post URLs here yet.

I would normally be interested in investigating further, since I have a ton of resources I could throw at this network and grow its metrics much bigger, but this abnormality put me off. I did send the seller a few questions and he didn't convince me either. What's your opinion on this?

Are you the 4th bidder?
Why are you so paranoid about this?

144 bids is crazy. I will be studying the auction. Will send you my research.

OP is either selling his site ( the one in question ) or the real seller has ( what i have seen for fiverr ) a gig share , so 10 other flippa acc. all bidding on his own site , to boost knowledge of it ( as u say all the member now see the war over the site ) ..... he is creating his own promotions via his own accounts on flippa then at the end he is guaranteed to cover his reserve...

simple really.

Interesting auction, will be watching it.

ying-yang said:

OP is either selling his site ...

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(sigh) must I really quote myself:

Netvertiser said:

I would normally be interested in investigating further, since I have a ton of resources I could throw at this network and grow its metrics much bigger, but this abnormality put me off. I did send the seller a few questions and he didn't convince me either.

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If I bid, that happens in the last hour, not weeks before. Why this is interesting too is because I have never seen so many bidders that look fake to me. And if you are to push the price so high why not set the reserve higher and stop for a while, then slowly getting closer and then go over it and wait for the sucker. The higher you go with fake bidding and further from the reserve the slimer the chance of finding a sucker with money to overbid you.

It's the first time I am seeing such a craze and I find it interesting and not to stay alone with my own opinion I am turning to the crowd to see what others think.

If it's genuinely making the $9600 a month income (I haven't looked into it) then it's worth ~$180k to a serious investor, so the current bidding is pointless anyway. There are plenty of stupid buyers on Flippa who think they can get a "bargain". Flippa is so overrun with idiots these days, it's not worth visiting - just look at the comments on the auction if you need any proof of that.

It isn't worth the price. I personally don't think it is making such a huge amount as mentioned.

P.S : I can see he is a new seller with no flippa history.

A friend of mine who bought and sold tons of sites on Flippa warned me about Flippa and the amount of scammers on it lately. Mainly from India and Pakistan. Using bought traffic for the analytics, friends/colleagues bidding on each others listings, paid facebook likes and using US proxies to push traffic to their site as if the site they are selling gets tons of tier 1 traffic. I'm staying the hell away from Flippa

those are just bunch of old expired domains nothing else , he is just scamming noobs.


-=-

zetone66 said:

A friend of mine who bought and sold tons of sites on Flippa warned me about Flippa and the amount of scammers on it lately. Mainly from India and Pakistan. Using bought traffic for the analytics, friends/colleagues bidding on each others listings, paid facebook likes and using US proxies to push traffic to their site as if the site they are selling gets tons of tier 1 traffic. I'm staying the hell away from Flippa

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u are true. the are so many overrated websites there. DP much better for me.

It looks a bit dodgy, but my main concern would be the fact he is disclosing all of the sites he is selling links/posts on. He's basically showing the world all of the sites which sell links - I'm pretty sure that isn't going to go down well with the big G. Wouldn't surprise me if they're slapped and provide little value to anyone who purchases a post there in the future. I certainly wouldn't fancy paying a potential $100k+ for that risk.

Well he says $9600/month WITH 2-3 hours of work a day. So counting the manpower, it's actually going to be worth much less in cash. The $9600/month is basically on trust.

The SEO for the guestpostdirectory site is almost nonexistant (8 referring domains) and yet he claims he gets 70% of the new contacts through there.

It could be legit but there's a lot of IFs. In my experience working with clients who bought sites with "SEO" on Flippa, if there's a lot of IFs, assume the worst. At the very least, you would want to evaluate every site on the network to ensure it's actually legit.

The sites themselves do look legit though would need more research individually. Also, he's basically exposed a paid link network to Google if they are looking to shut down this type of network -- maybe they already hit some of his clients so hes selling before the weather gets worse. This is the real risk. If he's hosting all the sites on the same webhost same GA id, same adsense, same footprints, it's basically a paid link network to Google. But they don't even need to find the footprints, he's already revealed the sites.

But I guess whether or not it's a "link network" vs a network of real sites, depends on the quality and relevance of posts on each site.

I agree with the above posts, it's way to much risk for such a large investment.

danalytics said:

Also, he's basically exposed a paid link network to Google if they are looking to shut down this type of network -- maybe they already hit some of his clients so hes selling before the weather gets worse. This is the real risk. If he's hosting all the sites on the same webhost same GA id, same adsense, same footprints, it's basically a paid link network to Google. But they don't even need to find the footprints, he's already revealed the sites.

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I know for a fact that a few of those domains dropped from decent PRs in the last update, but on the other hand I guess he's still got a decent nucleus that still have PR (for those link buyers that place any importance on this metric). By revealing those sites he has severely hurt his business even more, though.

Yeah i saw this auction too, what strikes me is that he just mentions almost 800K visits and no proof...And even more bizarre, with that amount of visits he didn't even take the time to add Adsense to the sites...

probably fake account bidding to raise interests and increase pricing.

I'll be very surprised if the auction ends without Flippa intervention. Flippa has the tools (very damn good ones I might add) to pick off shill bidding once they put eyes on a listing. They rely primarily on an automated algorithm which can be fooled but once they put a human on the threatmetrix figures, the bidding pattern, the computer footprints (about 10 metrics sniffed out by javascript, flash and beacons), if proxy usage is involved, IP reverse dns location and about a dozen other metrics they are almost impossible to defeat.

This seller has gotten past the algo but once Danny or his replacement (huge shift of personnel lately and I haven't kept up) on the job this listing is toast. Anyone that has done serious research or selling on Flippa knows the bidding pattern is not normal and highly suspect.

Flippa integrated this service almost a year ago. If you are in the business of shill bidding you probably better do some research.

http://www.threatmetrix.com/technology/

I don't think there's shill bidding going on really, there's just too much bids and as you mentions they would have figured it out already with all the tools they have to detect that.

When looking at most of the sites, it seems they are a bunch of expired domains with some content on them. The guest posts might well be a good source of income, but the sites itself aren't worth that much imo.

Looks like a fake auction to me, 99% people will place 1 bid and then wait for last 2-3 days of the auction before bidding again, why would they keep on bidding if they know that the auction has another 20 days left?

sagarpatil said:

144 bids is crazy. I will be studying the auction. Will send you my research.

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Can you send me it too