Domain Appraisals
In Affiliate Marketing | 2 comments | permalink
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
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2 COMMENTS
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Will you please advise me where I can find an accurate web domain appraisal?
My husband and I are going through a divorce and we both own a web domain and wish to know how to finacially split the value. Thanks Diane
The only thing worse is someone selling a website basing the value on its predicted pagerank.