We’ve all seen those websites that show up in the SERPs that are just there because the domain has been around for years and has managed to pick up a few links along the way. They’re listed in dmoz, PR 4 or 5, but the content is really old. What if there was a way to dig through the list of sites in your niche and find the few that been abandoned by their owners? Don’t you think a some of those owners would be willing to sell you their websites far below their true value? They are! You just need to find them.
Old, Authoritative, Ranking Websites Are Waiting For You
I built a tool that will help you find sites you can buy that are old and authoritative in your niche. There are websites in almost every niche that have built up authority over years but have been abandoned by their owners. These absentee owners are often happy to unload their old websites on you for very little. The trick is finding these hidden gems amongst all the active websites. You can spend hours going through directories and SERPs looking for websites that are abandoned or you can use the tool I built to find them quickly and automatically.
Sitefinder301 - Find A Killer Deal On An Old Website.
Sitefinder301 uses the dmoz Open Directory and the Internet Archive to find sites that are relevant to your niche that haven’t been updated in a long time. If you’re lucky you can find a great site with an owner that is willing to sell it for very little.
How It Works
You supply a dmoz category URL and Sitefinder301 examines all the sites that are in it and finds the ones that haven’t been updated in a long time. It gives you PageRank and Whois information on the sites so you can quickly determine if it’s worth buying and who to contact. It’s a quick and easy way to come up with a short list of acquisition targets out of hundreds of possible websites.
Enough Already Where’s The Goods?
Ok here it is, the product of late night php hacking:
Benefiting From Your Acquisition
Here’s a couple ideas for what to do with your new site:
- Put up new content and rank quickly for valuable terms. Build upon the old sites authority and create something of real value.
- Put up a page that promotes your product or service and funnels visitors to your current website.
- Redirect the old site to your current site and benefit from it’s authority and traffic.
Share And Share Alike
Sitefinder301 is open source. You can install it on your SEO tools website or hack it for your own purposes. Download the source here: /makebeta/sitefinder301/sitefinder301code.zip
All I ask is you pass some link friendship back my direction :).
13 responses so far ↓
1 Star Sightings » Blog Archive » Pick Up A Great Website For Cheap // Oct 1, 2007 at 1:37 am
[...] A cool person wrote an interesting post todayHere’s a quick excerpt:Sitefinder301 uses the dmoz Open Directory and the Internet Archive to find sites that are relevant to your niche that haven’t been updated in a long time. If you’re lucky you can find a great site with an owner that is willing to sell … [...]
2 John // Oct 22, 2007 at 8:46 pm
I may be a little slow, but how to you install SITEMINDER301? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
3 justin // Oct 22, 2007 at 8:57 pm
You have to have a server or computer with php running. Then you’d download the source code and set the config file settings. I don’t really have the time to walk you through it, sorry :(. You can use it straight from my server though without installing it.
4 hearder.com » Looking for a cheap authority site? // Nov 3, 2007 at 7:07 am
[...] A great idea, check out the posting at : http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/tools/sitefinder301/ [...]
5 uGuX SEO // Dec 12, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Hey, awesome idea. How would it be possible to scan more than one page at a time in DMOZ? Would it be possible to set it to scan starting at a top directory and then scan all of the subdirectories? What page of code would I have to modify? Thanks for any advice you can give.
6 justin // Dec 12, 2007 at 9:06 pm
uGux,
I believe there is a way to download the entire directory. If you wanted to scan the whole thing you’d probably just want to download it and figure out how to parse it and then feed the urls into the script some how. I can’t really go into what it would take to do that sort of thing cause it’s a pretty big project.
7 Open English // Dec 13, 2007 at 12:35 pm
great tool… even though I’m not really looking to buy sites right now I find it really cool and interesting. Maybe in the future I’ll try to get some of these… some of them are very high quality.
Thank you.
8 SEO Articles and Tips // Mar 30, 2008 at 5:42 am
A great tool. thanks again.
9 Tim // Jul 30, 2008 at 3:20 pm
A great tool thanks
10 Dejan // Oct 24, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Interesting method. Thank you.
11 Posicionamiento web Valencia // Jan 19, 2009 at 12:16 pm
It is a good idea and useful.
12 John // Feb 11, 2009 at 7:57 pm
So what happened to sitefinder? I see that it’s broken on this site and cannot be downloaded. Will it be released again?
13 justin // Feb 17, 2009 at 12:59 pm
The download link has been fixed:
http://www.merchantos.com/sitefinder301/sitefinder301code.zip
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