I have been investing in websites for years now and will continue to do so because the returns are amazing. However no matter how experienced I am, I never buy websites with a certain 4 traits.
The reason I never buy websites with these certain 4 traits is because it makes the investment far more risky. In this post I am going to outline just why these 4 traits are danger signs to look out for so you can better understand what to look out for when investing in websites.
- Black Hat SEO
There is no doubt that websites need to have good SEO to rank well in the search engines and gain a whole lot of traffic, which can then be monetized. But to build up your websites SEO there are 2 types of techniques, one which is recommended by the search engines and really helps your website grow organically and one in which the search engines penalize because they don’t comply with the search engines rules.The best types of SEO techniques are called White Hat and as you might of guessed, the SEO techniques which are looked down upon are called Black Hat. Now when black hat techniques are used to build up the SEO of a website it can work quite well and quite quick , which is why website owners tend to use them.However you can be penalized by Google and the other search engines for using Black Hat SEO techniques, which means the website will be bumped far down in the rankings. Meaning less traffic and less sales for the website, which is certainly why I never buy websites with black hat techniques.I would really love to dive in and explain exactly what those White Hat and Black Hat techniques are, however this post would be exceedingly long (and could get boring). So I have left it up to the experts over at PushOn where you can check out what those Black Hat And White Hat SEO techniques
- PBN
This is another danger sign to look out for that most early website investor don’t really know about. A PBN stands for Private Blog Network, and how this works is. The seller may own a network of blogs which link into the website they are selling. And when a website has links into it from other websites or blogs (like from a PBN), the SEO of the website will grow and it will get ranked higher on the search engines.Where this becomes dangerous is when the seller sells this website, they may not include the PBN in the sale. Meaning if you are to invest in that website, you have no control over whether the seller will keep linking to your new website or if they will delete the links already linking into the website. And if for example they delete those links, which is possible, it will cause your new investment to plummet in rankings.Hence why I always warn website investors to either never buy websites with a PBN or to at least put in place some measures of control before going ahead with the sale. - Duplicate Content
No body likes stealing and people who steal get punished right. This is also the case with websites, meaning any website which copies content or uses the same content as another websites (stealing) being text, images or whatever it may be, they will be punished.The content copiers or stealers should I say can be punished in two ways. Either the original owner of the website they have copied and taken from can legally sue, or if they don’t happen to find the offender themselves the search engines usually do. And they can detect websites in which have duplicate content and penalize those websites automatically by dropping them down in the rankings.This causes a decline of traffic, which trickles to a decline in sales and business for that website diminishes. This is a great reason to never buy websites with duplicate content because you don’t want that headache as the new owner. - Bad reviews
This one speaks for itself as we all know there is nothing worse than a website which has bad reviews for a range of things. They could have poor products, services, customer service and the list can go on.Which is why I urge website investors to get online and check out the reviews of a website before they invest in it. And obviously to never buy websites where they found negative reviews or many complaints from customers over their social media channels.
I hope I was able to shed some light and provide some great information why to never buy websites with these 4 traits. And if there is something you would like me to cover on investing in websites, please let me know in the comment box below.
If you would too like more info on investing in websites, be sure to check out my blog, which has a wide range of tips, training and info for you.
