question Have you ever purchased a domain or site with fake stats?

Not really fake, but years ago I bought a domain that showed high traffic on godaddy auctions for a niche I was in, found out after I bought it all the traffic was just from other sites hotlinking an image that used to be hosted on the domain. Lesson learned.

Shimmy said:

Not really fake, but years ago I bought a domain that showed high traffic on godaddy auctions for a niche I was in, found out after I bought it all the traffic was just from other sites hotlinking an image that used to be hosted on the domain. Lesson learned.

Click to expand...

I've had this a few times. Set up an image with some teaser stuff, and simple links displayed for the surfer to use, You can pick up a bit of qualified traffic this way.

Back in the day of traffic names, names with OVT w/extension, The only one i ever bought, Had fake Overture stats and traffic stats, It was getting traffic alright, but the traffic was fraud traffic, Once i complained about the crappy traffic, the traffic stopped pronto, I paid $150 for it, I lost a $150 too, and learned a valuable lesson.

Now, how do we prevent this? What are tools to verify traffic claims

One thing to look for is bounce rate.
Most purchased bot traffic is only there for 1 sec or less.

• Look at traffic sources, see if the bounce rate for each source is all about the same. typically it varies.

If seller claims traffic comes from facebook. Get on facebook, view the site profile, see how many likes & followers it has. contact some of them, b/c people buy fake likes too. If a sites getting legit traffic like that, chances are they are ranked in google. ask them their keywords. do the searches and see how high they show up. If it's not first page, they are not receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors a month from organic traffic. Look at the domain and page authority, see where the backlinks come from.


If it is a amazon site, make sure the stats you see are just for that one site. you can put links on 100 sites and sell one and claim your links are only on that site. If the site ranks first page, it's probably true or if you get verified ppc records.

If they claim direct type in traffic. Figure out why that many people are typing that in. check the searches for that exact term per month. if theres only 20 searches for that(sie).com then I guarantee 100,000 people are not typing that in to the address bar.

Basically, do your research before spending large amounts of money. There are people who put as much work into building these scam sites as it takes to actually rank a site. I have a site 5 weeks old ranking on 2pg for numerous searches. Theyll spend six months of bot traffic to rip you off.

I buy domains off expired lists. Never had a fake one. lol