Stragety for buying websites

[tml89]

I am considering buying some websites that I need for a project Im working on. The topic dosent really matter, as long as it has decent back links and dosent do anything questionable. And of course needs to be indexed in google. My question is, where can I hunt for a website?

Are there reliable sites where I can find sites to buy?

What kinds of things should I check out about the site before I but it?

[Rosalind]

Without shelling out a lot of money for internet-monitoring services, there is no way to prove a site's traffic without a shadow of a doubt. After all, screenshots of stats pages are easy to fake.

Check Alexa statistics and toolbar PR. Neither of these will tell you anything on their own since they are no indication of true traffic levels, but they begin to build up a picture. Also check domain age, search engine positioning for obvious keywords and the number of pages in the index.

Other than that, just take a look at the content and consider how useful it might be to visitors. If there are plenty of articles and good pictures, the domain may well be worth buying.

A lot of domains are for sale because the owner has discovered that they don't actually attract as much traffic or make as much money as expected. Hang around at various marketplaces (which I can't mention due to TOS) and you will soon get a feel for the types of sites that webmasters are offloading more frequently, and which are flooding the market.

[vincevincevince]

To be quite honest it depends on what your project is.

But I will say this - if the website has decent back links and dosent do anything questionable - you're not looking at 'just' a few hundred dollars.

[tml89]

Where are good places to look for websites? Im trying to search google, but the results leave much to be desired.

[wheel]

Comb Dmoz. In some areas there are more dead sites than you can count. You're looking for sites with a (C) 2000 and look like they were made in a 1998 copy of frontpage. Then check archive.org to see if the site has changed recently.