Purchasing an established web site

Side effects?

[sfatih]

I am planning to buy a 5+ years old web site that has good search engine rankings and decent backlinks. I never purchased a web site before, so I wonder if changing the whois information affects the search engine (especially Google) rankings of the web site. Or do the transfer operations during a web site purchase have other side effects? Thank you.

[blue_eagle]

hmmm, how much are you paying and what revenue does site promises?

[wheel]

I recently bought a site with some nice backlinks. I didn't change the content, but like a good little boy I updated the whois information to reflect my ownership. Result? Dmoz yanked the listing for the site.

[sfatih]

hmmm, how much are you paying and what revenue does site promises?

We did not agree on the final price but I expect it to be a little more than 5K. This is what the site currently earns in 2 years (net earnings).

I am planning to buy the site mainly because of the potential I see in it. But if the search engine rankings collapse after the purchase, the potential won't be there any more.

[sfatih]

I recently bought a site with some nice backlinks. I didn't change the content, but like a good little boy I updated the whois information to reflect my ownership. Result? Dmoz yanked the listing for the site.

That doesn't sound good, and doesn't look like a coincidence either. But I checked and this site I want to purchase doesn't have a DMOZ listing.

I want to ask couple questions if you don't mind. Did you experience any other side effects after purchasing the site? Are the search engine rankings for main keywords intact? How long has it been since you purchased the site?

[Frequent]

wheel,

Any chance the site seller was a DMOZ editor?

That would be quite a racket. Become a DMOZ editor, build fairly clean sites and get them set up with a high PR DMOZ category link since it is such a hot selling point, sell them, delist them, rinse, repeat...

Freq---

[Eltiti]

Freq: I guess the first part of your idea could be a way for corrupt editors to make some money; but I'm not sure why they would want to delist the site after they sold it --to create some "badwill" with the buyer and risk having their scheme exposed?!

[Frequent]

They could de-list it for the following reasons:

Keep the competition in the category low.

In most cases the drop would simply be attributed to the "mysteries" of dmoz or (as in this case) blamed on the whois change. The seller would not be blamed.

In hope that the buyer tries to buy another site from them with a dmoz link.

I'm sure there are more reasons others here on the board could come up with as well.

Freq---

[wheel]

The seller was a client of mine who was exiting the business. He was letting the site drop so I bought it from him. Sorry, no fodder for the dmoz corruption advocates here. (actually, there's plenty of indication surrounding what happened that says the category is corrupt but the editor selling the site isn't one of them :) ).