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A few days ago, I decided I want to sell a site of mine. While I didn’t need money right away, I still wanted to cash in the value of a web property which I purchased a few months go and flipped it rapidly to a successful business. Selling a website can be quite difficult. For starters, it is very, very hard to find a buyer that offers you a fair price. Depending on your site, a fair price could be anywhere between 8X to 36X, where X is site the monthly net profit (also read this for a better glimpse). On rare occasions, you could sell your site based other factors except revenue: traffic, domain name value, niche position, etc.

There are a few places you can try your luck:

http://flippa.com/

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52

http://business.shop.ebay.com/Businesses-Websites-for-Sale-/11759/i.html?_nkw=site&_catref=1&_fln=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m282

For newbies: Flippa is the new version of Sitepoint’s marketplace. Sitepoint was a great resource for webmasters that wanted to sell stuff (one could also sell templates, wp themes etc.). Unlike Ebay and Digitalpoint, Flippa asks for a listing fee (and also a success fee, if applicable). Cheapest listing is $19 - quite a lot if you ask me. But when it comes to selling a site in mid x,xxx or higher, $19 doesn’t seem so much. However, I listed my site 3 times before I could find a buyer. And I am very confident that the buyer I found was found still because of my hard word, since I sent the URL of the last Flippa auction to all AdWords advertisers and to some direct competitors of mine. Practically, I did their job, as I could have sent the URL of my site since the beginning, and get Flippa out of the loop. My first auction had the following stats:

My second, which I reposted it (by the way, when you repost your auction, it will not reappear in the sub-categories which get most traffic: Price Rage ->High End; Mid Range; Entry Level) and which I also featured on the main page:

Well, I paid in total  $19+$19+$9+40 = $87 for roughly 1300 unique views to my site. And not a single bid. May I add that my site has a great domain registered since before 2000 (with over 150k searches per month), was on the first page of Google for main targeted keywords, was developed pretty nice - it’s all passive, has great revenue, multiple increase options and I was only asking 12X for it. How about that?

I took a peak to other successful auctions (maybe I am doing something wrong). I found it hard to believe similar sites to mine are actually being sold on Flippa.com. Actually, some are. For some unknown reason, I saw sites that had a lower quality then mine, and still getting bids of 12X to 16X. Either they were very lucky, or set the start price very low. Seems like the trick is to get a lot of bids although they are well under your reserve, buy the first page upgrade and maybe even ask your friends to bid in the beginning.

Overall, I can’t recommend Flippa to guys that want to get just a few hundreds on their sites. It’s simply not worth the listing fee. Even for my site for which I wanted only $10k, it seemed a pricey option. Anyway, if you have great established site, webmaster community (including me) browses Flippa from time to time. Just a hint: try to sell it first by your own.

EDIT: Looks like Google is actively working at this functionality. My picture was attributed to my blog eventually, and now that I also posted it on my site about eczema pictures, it looks like it’s attributed to this site instead. Looks like Google’s algo actively looks for the best quality of a specific picture that one can find online.

A while ago, I was talking about a small eczema that appeared on my right hand due stress accumulated during my Ph.D. thesis preparation. Inside this post, I also added an image of my condition. Well, now at a simple search for keywords “eczema psoriasis”, my image appears on Google, but other site is referred:

Although I haven’t received any inquiry from other web masters on the possibility of using my image on other web places, still my pic was stolen, and better yet, with the help and ignorance of G, is now present in their searches as made by other site. My main questions is: Why is now Google not referring my site for this image (if they really think it’s relevant for the search term), and instead, it is referring some low quality domain which doesn’t even pass copyscape: http://copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fieczematreatments.info%2F155%2Fwhat-causes-eczema-and-psoriasis%2F ?

My secondary questions are:

1. How come in 2011, with all the image processing algos out there, Google hasn’t yet found a way to attribute images to their respectful owners? It’s a matter of simply comparing the scales and the quality of the images. Even image crop processes can be now easily spotted. All that is needed is the determination, which sadly, Google lacks.

2. Why, although the site which stoled my image is hot-linking it, the attribution not made to my hot-linked blog?

3. What is their opinion on this situation (by “their”, I’m referring to the engineers from the department of quality search results or related - if there even exists such a thing)?

:¬|

It has been some time now since I first noticed a connection between Google’s and Bing’s results. I own a little niche site which I was updating regularly around one year ago, and was doing pretty good in search results, in both G and B. Unfortunately, due, lack of time (+ a little bit of laziness :D), I lost interest in keeping the site with fresh quality content. In other words, I just left it be. The interesting part is that as soon as my site started to fall in G’s search queries, it also went down on B’s. I found it curious, and then just moved at my business. But now, I have found that this link, this connection between G and B, is not just random. As reported by some other blogs [1][2][3], Google is providing Bing with search results! Btw, Bing released a nice statement, check it out. I really like the word “thoughts” here, in fact, I think it’s wonderfully used in this case.

Well, I’m not going to jump in the details of how G managed to reveal B’s theft (though from what I see , words like ‘hiybbprqag’ are becoming pretty popular ). I just find it spectacular that this kind of sh… can happed to big houses. As I am so so bored, I would pretty much like to see blood here. So my questions to you guys are “How do you think Google will retaliate? A lawsuit? Maybe a new operating system with half of the code from Microsoft’s Windows 7? Maybe all of it :D?”

As more that 90% of web searches performed today are made on Google, I will keep this random thoughts of mine focused on Google’s index. So, as many of you webmasters know, for virtually any query on Google that is not related to something you can actually buy, but is rather informational in nature, and consists of 2, 3 words, there are at least 2-3 user generated content sites that appear in the first results. Let’s give some examples:

1. sore throat remedies - howstuffworks.com, about.com, tipking.co.uk, answers.com, tipnut.com, getridofthings.com (not to mention the omnipresent webmd with it’s sister sites)

2. Rca Universal Remote - ehow.com (the first one), ask.com, yourdictionary.com, answers.com, ehow.co.uk

3.  cell phone lookup - ezinearticles.com, buzzle.com, articlesbase.com, articleblast.com

Well, my questions (which are not really my own, as many Google users - whether they are webmasters or simply web surfers - are also wondering these) are: Why do these sites have so much credit? Better yet, why do they get credit over some other quality sites that are focusing on a particular subject, like RCA remotes? Does a 400 words article on “how to program your RCA remote” even matches an entire site that is only about RCA remotes - site which may be continuously updated, edited, improved?

Well until some time ago, it did. But is seems that Google has finally waken up.  Following a post which I wrote merely an year ago, I finally see some desire to change this state of things. The web is boiling [1, 2, 3, 4] as monstrosities like the ones produced by DemandMedia (AnswerBag, Ehow, Livestrong) will soon meet their doom. Hopefully. The way I see it, the unique business model of DemandMedia is just a bunch of c..p. Their understanding of “high quality information” is a set of arbitrary stupid rules (oh yes, they have 10’s of manuals filled with rules) and 300 words articles, approved in numbers of 5000/day. So does EzineArticles, which approves 1000’s of articles per day. So do many other user generate content based sites. Is it really worth it (from the end-user point of view)?

So, what is your opinion on this? I will be waiting your toughs sent by you through our contact page. Thanks!

Today I will present 2 cases of sites which have made their way into top search engine queries for medium to high competition keywords by cheating.

The first is hemorrhoids - stop . net (I added spaces just in case ; ). So, this guy made his site on 27-Oct-09, and after only a few months, he gets top three for http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=hemorrhoids+treatment&cts=1274883514529&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= Also, he has a staggering 40000 links. But how does a hemorrhoid site get 40000 backlinks in just a few months? Well, if you do a yahoo backlink check, you will discover something very interesting. Basically, the guy exploits a joomla security breach and posts this kind of code on hundreds of sites: font style=“position:absolute;overflow:hidden;height:1px;width:1px” (you nasty little hacker!). After which he posts his links. Most webmasters don’t even notice their sites are used. And from what I see, not even Google cares.

Second is anti herpes . net (also remove spaces). So this guy bought a dropped domain (see domaintools), placed 3-4 pages of “impressive 5 stars highly quality content” and competes for a highly searched keyword: “herpes pictures”. What this guy is doing is a more obvious form of spam: posting his link on a network of blogs. From what I see (and from what you can see in yahoo backlink checker), a 1000 blogs network.

Well, in the light of those 2 cases presented above, my question is: Why should webmasters like you and me bother building good sites, with good and well researched content when people like the guys above are taking the big pieces of pie and leave us with 7th page sites?