About a week ago an Skype friend with a serious smoking problem :) showed me a listing on Flippa and asked me if I thought it was a scam. I don't do much on Flippa these days but thought I'd take a quick glance.
I went to the link he provided: https://flippa.com/2962570-pr-4-site-with-150-000-uniques-mo-making-2-587-mo-no-reserve-1-opening-bid
and immediately saw the title:
PR 4 Site with 150,000 uniques/mo making $2,587/mo - NO RESERVE! $1 OPENING BID.
I looked at his Alexa count and saw it said 10,679,386!
SCAM I told my friend - no further research necessary. While I know Alexa isn't an exact metric it certainly isn't this far off. The seller claims he's getting 150K uniques a month and has an Alexa count more inline of a website that gets about 1000 visitors a month? SCAM
So a few days went by and my friend reposted the link and now the listing has bids in the $800 range and he asked me once again to take a look as maybe I missed something. So this time I pulled out my list of resources and decided to prove this was nothing but a scam listing.
Besides the Alexa point I already made I looked at the PR4 rating and went to investigate his link profile. Well guess what? There isn't a link profile. There is one link with an Asian anchor text first seen a year ago and that website is dead (doesn't resolve). So this domain doesn't have valid PR. A valid PR4 website has a solid backlink profile of some sort. Here is the backlink profile of this website:
https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/...exDataSource=H
I went on my normal investigative routine and did a site:hh1g.com search. A total of 83 pages were indexed on Aug 22, in Google with 30 of those being document:write errors dated August 10, 2013. Clearly this site hasn't been running anywhere near the 14 months the seller has claimed with only about 50 indexed pages that weren't errors and nothing dated older than August 2013. Now I was curious just how old this website really was. Today's google shows a few more indexed pages but again they are all recent.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site...cial&start=159
Next I dug into Google cache which is a great resource for buyers to investigate suspect domains. Google cache has since updated in the last few days but when I looked on 8/22 it showed this domain was parked on GoDaddy and was an auction domain on August 5, 2013. Well now the pieces are coming together. So that is why Alexa was 10M and the total indexed pages in Google SERPs had 83 total links on 8/22. Well I should have taken a snapshot of the Google cache page showing it parked because now its updated to the website we see today. but we still have other free options to verify this is a new website and the seller's claims are complete bullshit.
I did a search on archive.org and sure enough there is the website with a recent snapshot dated June 3, 2013
http://web.archive.org/web/201306030...tp://hh1g.com/
Notice the appearance of the website and lack of monetization? Clearly in June this website had no ads and no script calculating website values. Now look at the seller's proof and claims of traffic / revenue from this website. I won't bore you with all the research you can do with that old website but clearly just two months ago this domain was in the hands of a different owner and without any monetization at all. Again this fits the all the metrics we can verify and contradicts what the seller is claiming.
With just 83 pages indexed on August 22, 2013 I looked to see just how many website lookups had been done by his script. Each website lookup creates a new webpage on this domain for Google to index. On August 22, this website had a total of 316 website lookups. Hardly the number you'd expect from a website with 150,000 unique visitors each month over the last year. Since August 22 he's increased this by about another 700 lookups and today the current total lookup of this website is 1,012.
http://hh1g.com/recent.php?page=51
Now that we know the website is brand new lets look over the seller's traffic and revenue proof.
https://flippa.com/auctions/2962570/...nts/892491.PNG
Look closely at the Views column and notice under Views there are 3 sub-columns (Total, Unique, %). Now take a calculator and try to figure out how in the hell those percentages were derived. In January he claims 320,109 total views, 100,499 Unique views calculating 9.7% of the traffic was unique. Well no. If those numbers were true (and we know they're not) then his Uniques were 31.40% of this total traffic. You can calculate all the other errors but again, his numbers don't work. Of course, we know this website is just 2 weeks old so all this information is complete bullshit.
There is plenty more that could be researched but suffice to say this website and listing is a complete scam.
Now the reason I spent all this time on this listing, other than the prodding of a friend, is because of the seller's name. Here he's about to poke someone straight in the ass and calling himself nomorescams
I feel sorry for the buyer that ends up with his 2 week old website.