This tool courtesy EP: Work from Home

Valuation reports explained

Thanks for using our valuation service. Each valuation report comes with the following information:

The Valuation Report

This section provides the domain name, date of the report and a valuation figure. This section reports the category of site you specified at the start (content site/blog/proxy etc). The category impacts a lot of the value of your site. People pay a much higher multiple of earnings for content sites than, say, incentivized sites.

If we were unable to query the WHOIS for your domain (for example, you mistyped it or the domain doesn't exist), you may get taken to an error page instead.

Confidence Level: No valuation is a figure set in stone. The actual price someone may pay you could vary based on numerous factors including the buyer's mood on the day. However, for some types of sites, bidding is very competitive and, given enough examples of such sites that have sold in the past, we are able to make very accurate valuations based to within 10% of what the site is likely to achieve at sale. This is the only valuation tool that gives you an indication for how accurate the figure is.

The Background Report

Age: The BG report starts with the information retrieved from WHOIS on the date of first registration of the domain and the age of the domain calculated from that. There is a preference among buyers for older rather than new domains.

Accounts: This is the section buyers are interested in over all others. They pour over figures, analyze them till they are blue in the face and the net profits here are going to play a very large part in the valuation. We give you a breakdown of the figures and, if you have provided the optional data in the form, details of gross and net profit, cost of running the site etc. For a more detailed analysis of business and accounting figures, cash flows, net profits and other data, here's a useful set of spreadsheets and other analytical tools.

Alexa: The Alexa rank and graph are reproduced here. If you don't see a graph, it may be a temporary problem with the Alexa site; you could follow the link to visit them directly and run various queries. For more on Alexa, what it is etc., please see our Alexa page.

Compete: Compete is another traffic monitoring and comparison company, like Alexa. More here.

Backlinks: The number and quality of a site's backlinks are very important to the site's stability and success. The backlinks decide a site's Page Rank, among other things. Many sites get more traffic from these backlinks than they do from search engines. Even sites that get most of their traffic directly from search engines rely on these backlinks to maintain their reputation with the SEs. Some buyers prefer sites with a lot of links from .gov and .edu domains as these are often indicative that a site is an authority in its field. Our backlink report shows the links back to the site's homepage, links to internal pages, total links and links from just the .gov and .edu domain. Each sub-section here has a link directly to the search result so you can see who links to the target site and explore those links further. More on backlinks here. Yahoo is used as the default engine for these searches as it is the one with the most reliable results. Google has stated that it is not presenting full results for linkback searches. Note, however, that Yahoo does display different results for the site: search when using and omitting the "www".

Traffic

The number of unique visitors is, as the asterisk indicates, a figure provided by the person running the valuation, not us.

Page Rank: Google PR is a ranking on a scale of 1-10 of a site's popularity. More on PageRank here. We attempt to pull the page rank of the home page and a few of the other pages with high PR. This is not always accurate as Google datacenters are notorious for not making this easy or useful. There may be other high PR pages not listed here. However, pages that are listed here with PR are probably showing the right PR.

Number of indexed pages in Google: This does what it says on the tin.

Technorati: The technorati rating for blogs is provided as a single figure here. More on technorati.

DMOZ: DMOZ is an old, volunteer edited internet directory. It is generally very selective of the sites it lists and sites have to meet very strict criteria. A site can have multiple entries in DMOZ and quality sites often do. Big authority sites like the BBC and CNN may have tens of thousands of pages listed in DMOZ. More on DMOZ here. If your target site has no listing that's not necessarily a negative, the site may never have applied for listing and never been discovered by a DMOZ editor.

Wikipedia: As our wikipedia page explains, a site with many links from wikipedia is more likely to be a useful and authoritative resource. However, a caveat: links that have only been around a short while may have been added by the site owner himself. Fortunately, you can check age of links by visiting the relevant Wikipedia page and going through the history of page changes that they so conveniently make available.

Contact Details:

If the owner of the site has specified that it's available for purchase, and provided contact details for buyers to contact him, you should find them here. Absence of any details suggests that either it's not for sale or the webmaster hasn't provided contact information for release to the public.

Display this valuation report on your web page

You can copy this code and paste it into your own page to provide your visitors with a direct link to your particular valuation report.

Further Research:

These are extremely useful links, don't dismiss them because of their location on the page. Clicking on them should take you directly to the relevant search for the target site itself.

Netcraft: Provides some fantastic information on the technologies behind a site, the host's server uptime etc.

URLtrends: Provides link information (both incoming and outgoing links) but also provides a range of great link popularity and ranking trend graphs if you scroll down the page. Go even further and you have a breakdown of keywords associated with the site.

SiteAdvisor: From McAfee checks the site for virus and spyware type problems and tells you if it's clean.

Archive: This is fabulous resource for seeing how a site looked in the past. It usually doesn't show any copy of the site from the last six months but if you want to go back further, it's a veritable treasure trove (unless the site owner has blocked the archive's robot from crawling his site - it happens sometimes)

Google: There are many advanced searched on Google that can throw up useful information. Here we provide direct links to two of them: the site: command that gives you a list of indexed pages, and the related: command that gives you a list of sites that Google considers related to your target site.

Internet Supervision: Wow! It pings the site from different cities all over the globe and almost instantly provides you a breakdown of how accessible the site is to users as far away as Australia, Canada, Santiago and St Petersburg, among others.

Web Sniffer: For the technically minded, this provides HTTP request and response header information, server type, HTTP version, header status and the content the server is presenting for that page.

Safe Browsing: Another Google tool, but not to do with search; safe browsing reports whether Google found any malware on the site at any of its recent visits.