Ask HN: Is Buying a Website for Its SEO Worth It?

3 points by MarcellusDrum 3y ago ↗ HN

I want to start a new business related to teaching programming. I have a 10K budget for now. A friend of mine has a tech blog that has 1.4 million views, and its on the first page of Google when searching for tech keywords in our langauge. He offered to sell me the website and a 9K Facebook page for $7000. It is worth mentioning that the website makes almost no money from adsense (ads are minimal, and RPM in this part of the world is extremely low). He makes some money through sponsored articles and backlinks.

While the operational costs of the project are very low, I was planning on spending most of the money on marketing. Would buying this website/brand be a worthy alternative?

3 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 15.1 ms ] thread

bitxbitxbitcoin 3y ago ↗

Try to quantify the SEO value of the site with free tools like semrush and ahrefs, also factor in some for how much you'd pay to have the website built as is.

Past pageviews don't really count for anything. What the last month's pageview count is is a lot more relevant.

To answer your question more directly, the answer is sometimes yes sometimes no. Sounds lke you might have a yes situation.

Feel free to reach out if you need any more tips!

MarcellusDrum 3y ago ↗

Tried some free SEO audits, and they website is getting scores in the 80s. But what is really making me optimistic is me testing it for myself. Googling Laravel (in our language) for example, the website is the first result, above Laravel's official website and Wikipedia. And in the first page for "Godot", "How to learn programming", "Cloud Computing", "Vue JS", and more.

I will start my new business as a subdomain, leaving (and adding) to the existing articles.

logicalmonster 3y ago ↗

IMO, it's a big advantage to be buying from a friend. When buying a site, it's hard to fully trust that some of the statistics like traffic figures aren't manipulated. In this case, you can probably have greater confidence that at least you're buying what you think you're buying.