May
8
A few months back I bought a country music related site. I may have wrote about the first month’s results here, I’m not sure. In anycase, the second month was suspiciously less than expected. In march the site made about $30 from adsense. During April I hired some good writers and added great content. To my surprise, the site came in at only $14 and change for April.
Around the same time as checking on the revenue stats for my sites, one of my writers contacted me and asked when the country music site would come out of construction. Oh shit. Not good considering the site wasn’t under construction. I pulled up the site in my usual browser (firefox) and then checked it in IE. Sure enough, it was a jumbled mess in IE. I checked the source and there was a list of about 75 link strings to various usual spam suspects such as pharmaceuticals. This list was screwing up the format.
I bought the website as a WP blog and transferred it. I never bothered to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of WP (the website purchased was 2.1). I told someone else recently that inquired, I’m more of a businessman than a developer or programmer, so these things don’t smack me in the face the way they would others.
So, do you know what this is?
It’s bad. That’s what it is: bad. Yeah, I’d like to turn it on it’s side like those monkeys in the commercial but I can’t. This is the traffic chart from what I can only assume is a result of the spam attack. My G analytics suddenly have words like “credit report” and “diet pills” as the top words G crawled for the late April time frame, a change from the usual “country music” and “alan jackson” type stuff the website is based on.
Apparently there is a known issue with WP 2.1 which allows spammers to post links directly to your template files. THey were in an invisible container, so you didn’t see the actual links ion the site. Upgrading is not always fun, especially when you have just bought a website and you did not build it yourself.
The Lesson Learned for Buying Websites:
If the site is a WP based blog, check or ask the owner what version of WP it’s running on. Before buying the website, see if the owner will upgrade WP before selling the website to you. If not, take this into consideration. If there is a public forum associated with the website auction or website for sale site, post the issue publicly so it is a fare playing field for everyone. Hey, better yet, if the website seller won’t upgrade, post a link to this post!
If you’re fine with doing the upgrade ( I actually have done many of them, and I can say with experience it rarely ever goes perfect. The older the version, the more prone to upgrade problems) or you don’t have a choice (thewebsite seller won’t and you still want the site) then just keep that in mind as another associated risk when valuing the site. Then, take another look at the graph above before moving on.
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