Comments on: Buyer Beware: Buying Domain Name Based on Traffic Stats

By: LS Morgan

LS Morgan — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:04:25 +0000

Don is right. There are plenty of free tools out there to see if the ‘stated traffic’ is coming from an old development scheme, or *potentially* might be type in traffic. Still, as great a name as right.org is, someone would have to be a complete rookie at this to believe it was getting that sort of direct navigation. Didn’t Frank Schilling once say in his blog that mortgages.org only got a handful of typeins? Do the people buying these sorts of names- based on traffic alone- seriously not have a portfolio of their own names they can reference and from that, attain some modest degree of comprehension as to how another name with a similar ‘keyword gravity’ might perform?

To buy right.org thinking it received tens of thousands of typeins is almost child-like in it’s striking naivete.

By: Jamie Zoch

Jamie Zoch — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:45:28 +0000

@Don,
As stated, the domain was purchased based on Keyword and not solely on traffic but I have and I’m sure many do…. just put trust in the traffic number provided with a trusted source like Sedo. I agree some tools like Compete.com can help but they just are not that accurate. Backlinks, indexed pages, PR, Wayback etc. can help, but again, these are just tools and do not tell the whole story always. Direct Navigation is one source that is hard to gauge, and some domains get the main source of traffic from DN.

By: don

don — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:38:23 +0000

I think there are enough tools today to figure out if a website is getting the traffic indicated…with this site, the buyer should have first searched to see backlinks, indexed pages, gone over to compete.com and used some common sense…why would right.org be receiving this type of traffic, research to see if it was previously developed, etc

I have seen some auctions where the seller shows only 30 days worth of stats, I think this is also a huge red flag as it is much easier to manipulate stats for 30 days versus 1 year

By: SinoPak

SinoPak — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:39:29 +0000

nice help man

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:46:02 +0000

A very sad story to hear, I hope the seller gets banned from Sedos service or better yet this sale get canceled. Since stats were provided its clear this is a metrix the purchaser used when making his valuation.

Having said that, the buyer really didn’t do much homework…the pattern can be clearly seen with basic tools found online for free…

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/right.org+right.com/

By: Mojito Recipe

Mojito Recipe — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:53:04 +0000

Or a simple cron job that requests the site every minute or two.

By: Philip Ferreira

Philip Ferreira — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:50:47 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to put out this information Jamie! I hope your article, and pressure from our fellow domineers will ultimately convince Sedo and the other domain selling services out there become transparent in their traffic reporting for domains for sale.