People with SEO knowledge buy an old website simply for two reasons. For one thing, they don’t have to build an audience and wait for the site to be indexed by search engines, enjoying website’s golden years of trust. For another, they can avoid years of link building. Because of this, many successful online businesses take the advantage of flipping websites.
Before you dive into it, you should stop and have a good think about these 5 mistakes to avoid when buying an old website.
1. Buy a site irrelevant to your business
If you find an old website that doesn’t not match your business whatsoever, it cannot be used as your primary business website. Search engines may already have it categorized as being about a special subject and will not allow it to rank for keywords of different subject matter.
Instead, you should buy a website that has targeted traffic for a product or service you already produce or sell. This is a good way to build a customer base very quickly.
2. Buy a parked website
A parked website is usually not completely developed. This kind of website normally has little or no good content. It has no functioning and been created solely for make money through low-quality content or ads. Domains of a parked website are normally regarded as spam by search engines.
3. A domain name is irrelevant to your business
You can’t ignore branding when buying an old website. Although some websites has ranked well for your keywords, its domain names don’t make sense for your business.
For example, if you sell medical equipment for hospitals and find a site for sale that is on the first page of Google for medical equipment, but its domain name happens to be homemedicalequipment.com, you have to give up this site, for everyone who wants to buy medical equipment for hospital will be confused by your name.
4. Buy a relatively new site
Some people try to make a quick money by selling a website shortly after buying them. They think their website have a good domain name and some content. Normally, a website less than one year is not worth buying it because it won’t have a good TrustRank. To find out a site’s age, use the public whois lookup.
5. Buy a website with few links
Although you find a website that has more than 10 years old, it doesn’t mean that this website is good to buy. You have to check whether it has accumulated links in that time. A website, no matter how old it is, will be regarded as a completely new website if it doesn’t create any backlinks.
