Looking to cash out? Cover your tracks!

Hey guys,

Just going through a few emails from my brokerage clients and there's a general theme I see with sites that I CAN'T sell.

Too many people blast their sites with spammy links without thinking of the future consequences. Yes, you might save a little bit of time and rank for a nice keyword, which could bring you income in the short term...

But longer term, if you ever come to sell the site (which is always a nice pay day) then serious buyers ALWAYS look at your SEO. If you've just been lazy and blasted away with xrumer/scrapebox then buyers will know. You won't get a decent price as the risk is just too high for the buyer. Sometimes you can get lucky, but in business it's good to minimise your risk and maximise your chances of success.

BH SEO is great - but do it right. Build your spammy links to WH properties pointing at your money site. I'm not a SEO expert, but I know what sells when it comes to sites, and it's certainly not sites with a spammy backlink profile.

Moral of the story... think long-term, treat all your sites as a business and think from the point of view of a potential buyer. Always keep your exit strategy in mind (which is usually a flip) I'm not saying go completely whitehat, just don't be naive and think people can't see your backlinks (especially first tier).

Good luck and happy spammin'

Great post. And also, when you build links fast and G-oogle does one of its infamous updates all your "hard work" will go to waste because they are getting smarter and the sites that normally get hit are the ones that do BlackHat directly on their sites.

So moral of the story, build lots of white hat links.... and black hat links to the white hat links only (when ever you can).

Then again : What is considered whitehat? Where does it start and where does it end?

Is an AMR Blasts already considered spammy? It's all really subjective..

But I do completely concur, that you should focus on building "high quality" (Web 2.0 Props, High PR3+ Profiles, Blog Posts, Social Bookmarks, Article Links, Docshare Links, Edu/Gov etc.) links to your money site and blast those with spammy SB/xRumer Links.

No one can deny, that xRumer/SB Links work (really well), but better be safe than sorry.

Good. most of the people don't optimize site properly and sell them to the clients and we all know that most of the clients don't even know what is SEO. so they suffer for the low quality SEO. i think before selling a site at least we should check the SEO. it will save us from future dangers.

I've never had problems flipping my sites that are built on nothing but spammy links. For my adsense sites, I have never gotten anything less then 11 months income and 15 months being the norm (for the really established adsense sites). From my own experiences, if your monthly income has been stable for a while, it still fetches the same. Those are just my experiences with adsense sites and ymmv...meathead is the flippa guru around these parts!

Another great post by you Thomas.
Yes indeed I agree, thinking long term is quite clever, my cousin worked in a shop when she was 16, and she got the shop like $100 extra, and the shop owner was quite mad, since he will lose few customers from it (they won't come back to the shop).

mudbutt said:

I've never had problems flipping my sites that are built on nothing but spammy links. For my adsense sites, I have never gotten anything less then 11 months income and 15 months being the norm (for the really established adsense sites). From my own experiences, if your monthly income has been stable for a while, it still fetches the same. Those are just my experiences with adsense sites and ymmv...meathead is the flippa guru around these parts!

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That's a fair point - if you have stable income it's easier to convince buyers that it will continue to be stable.

I'm not sure what sort of prices you are talking, but when you get in the $20k range you start to get more sophisticated buyers who will do a lot more due diligence. Some obviously don't, but if you sell consistently you'll start finding more and more who do.

Sophisticated buyers with good budgets will happily pay 24-36x monthly if you have a decent history behind the site and can show "whitehat" SEO. If you've got more BH tracks then it's likely they will price the risk into their offer (hence 12x).

So are you saying when youre selling a site around 20k buyers start to look? I would imagine its around 10k.

imlol said:

So are you saying when youre selling a site around 20k buyers start to look?

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I'd say even less, just really depends on the site (and buyers).

imlol said:

So are you saying when youre selling a site around 20k buyers start to look? I would imagine its around 10k.

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$20k was more a guideline figure. Some will look a lot lower, others higher. Chances are if the site is under $10k it doesn't have too much history anyway, or has a lot of room for growth.

janist said:

Then again : What is considered whitehat? Where does it start and where does it end?

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Obviously that's very subjective, but generally speaking if a potential buyer sees a lot of irrelevant links, they would be safe to assume you are spamming. Other warning signs might be 100,000 links to a site that doesn't rank particularly well and isn't in a very competitive niche. Certainly doesn't look natural to a potential buyer... nor is it likely to look good in Google's eyes.

meathead1234 said:

Obviously that's very subjective, but generally speaking if a potential buyer sees a lot of irrelevant links, they would be safe to assume you are spamming. Other warning signs might be 100,000 links to a site that doesn't rank particularly well... nor is it likely to look good in Google's eyes.

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Meathead is becoming an SEO Guru on top of a Site Flippping Guru!

Excellent points for anyone whether you are selling a site or going to keep it and try and rank it.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Meathead is becoming an SEO Guru on top of a Site Flippping Guru!

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Well... I had a good teacher

It's all just logic really, but you'd be surprised how many people that approach me with sites that have just been spammed to death with links and they wonder why the traffic/revenue is dropping

Hi great post,certainly something to consider when building our websites.