Traffic Domain Trickery

petertdavis · Mar 17, 2004

If someone is considering buying a traffic domain, for the traffic, one of the things you might want to check is the Alexa ranking. What's the easiest way to check the Alexa ranking? Have the toolbar installed, and load the url in your browser. When you're looking at the stats for a traffic name, and you see a bunch of clicks from dnforum.com, you know what those are and you can evaluate and adjust to account for that. But, what if the person selling the domain didn't make the url a clickable link in his for sale post? You type in the name. But, then, the next interested buyer that comes along counts your click as part of the traffic. What happens if that traffic was coming from a dozen different domain for sale postings at different forums? How many of those does it take to distort the perceived value of a traffic domain?

My proposal: DNforum, and all the others too, should require traffic domain for sale postings to have a clickable link to the url and have the seller show the referrers along with the rest of the stats. That way, if half of the traffic is comeing from DNforum, Domainstate, ********, etc, the new owner won't be surprised later.

mole · Mar 17, 2004

Well - you shouldn't buy a domain based on traffic - unless the name makes sense to you as to why it is generating traffic in the first place. Buying roaurnc.com because someone says it generates 1,000 uniques a day is suspect at the very least.

Traffic is a trick you play. Simple as that. Tricks have no inherent value.

stueynet · Nov 21, 2004

Non-Organic traffic is a trick. Organic traffic (that is that comes from people actually doing regular web searches and finding your site) is very valuable even if its low. The only thing I look for in evaluating traffic is the referrer and search term sections of the stats. I have had many people here try to sell me domains with 400 uniques a day and upon investigation I found that all the traffic was coming from either a popunder campaign that they bought, or from a click exchange site that they are a member of.