There are many factors, when we talk about the value of a website:
- domain name
-
- traffic
- income
- content
- members database(if available)
- page rank
- backlinks
- others(brand, age, …)
To simplify things, some people take monthly income, multiply it by 12 and get the price to sell their website.
Others use paid appraisal, like the one on sedo.com. You pay a fee and an expert analyzes everything in detail for you. When we talk about 4 zeroes or more, this is a good idea, otherwise it’s a waste of money.
Lastly, there are some free programs that do everything automatically:
In my opinion these are just to make you feel good, like you are sitting on a gold mine, because they always seem to show big numbers.
As you probably know, Pagerank is based upon this formula:
L() returns the number of outgoing links. Example:
L(www.google.com)=28
L(www.yahoo.com)=164
Assuming google.com and yahoo.com has the same PR and the same backlinks, it’s much more valuable to get a link on google, because of the low number of outgoing links.
Therefore, we need some tools to count outbound automatically and here are some:
Checking the Page Rank history of a site can be very useful since it can give you hints about the age of the site and the most important, it can show if the site was penalized by Google at some point. Generally if PR was higher than 0, and then dropped to 0, it’s very likely site was penalized. Another case is if PR drops 2 units or more. The best tool to check for PR history is URL Trends. Simply enter the URL in the search box, then push Site Rankings.
