Checklist to buy new blog
Aug 18th, 2008 by Administrator
Obviously you can register a new domain, start a link campaign, create great content, and you have a new blog or website. Another alternative is to buy a website or blog and for the price that you will pay you will be able to buy something that has some content and many links pointing to it.
Well, nothing is every easy. I bought this blog from one of those PayPerPost bloggers that saw their business disappear with the Google punishment for selling links. I thought that with all the links pointing to this domain and a few thousand indexed pages, I could clean it up and get a reasonable return on investment.
I have done fairly well with this domain but despite trying to clean up the domain by eliminating bad links, this morning I saw that there were all these links and keywords that were showing up in Google search but I could not see anything when I visited the page. Then I looked into the code and saw hundreds of links pointing to those websites that promise to sell all kinds of prescription drugs. I checked the links list in the Wordpress dashboard and could not find them. Guess what? These were hidden links that are not visible to humans but can be read by robots. A clear violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. It took me a little while to figure out that they were in the header file of the Wordpress installation and I cleaned them right away. I am hoping that Google will treat this as a step in the right direction.
So when you want to buy a blog, due diligence is critical. Don’t just look for the obvious but also for the hidden. I would like to say that the previous owner of this blog inserted those hidden links and was probably being paid for these even though the domain has been under my control for a few months now. There is a lot of fraud these days in the world of online publishing and if you want to buy a new blog, you have to be extremely careful.
