Domain Appraisals

Yesterday I told you about one of the things to be wary of when buying a site: the over valuation of web site potential. Today I am going to warn you about another trick that is becoming more and more popular: Domain Appraisals.

A domain appraisal is basically some company that looks at your domain name and assigns a value to it. In theory this sounds very nice, but in practice it serves very little purpose.

For example: I was told about a web site for sale yesterday and the owner had taken screenshots of the revenue, traffic etc…. and then right at the end he put an image of a domain appraisal that he had on his domain for $50,000 - $75,000

At best the domain was worth $50, but this appraisal had raised the perceived value of this site.

I tested DeanHunt.com on a few sites and the general results were that it is worth a minimum of $5,000 just for the domain. Which is clearly a load of nonsense.

What concerns me is that I have the sneaking suspicion that these scripts are designed to be as flattering as possible so that the domain owner wants to brag about it. This basically means that he/she will start telling people about it via blogs, forums etc and therefore the appraisal site gets loads of one-way backlinks.

For legal reasons I will not say that it is a SCAM

So for those of you considering buying a web site this is lesson two of the DeanHunt.com site buying guide: BEWARE OF THE DOMAIN APPRAISAL

DOMAIN APPRAISALS - TOGETHER WE CAN CRACK IT