Hello,
I have been offered a site for sale that looks a bit too good to be true, it makes high $xxx / month with adsense, and the traffic reports via analytics show roughly 3k visitors / day - 80% of wich is from the USA.
What worries me is that over 70% of the traffic is direct, and 70% of the traffic has an engagement of between 0-10 secs.
The bounce rate however is low, at a mere 50%, for a blog, that is not bad.
I would love to hear any input about this, is it weird to have so much direct traffic? Or is the chance high that this is paid traffic from expired domains or such?
There currently is adsense on the site, so i know the domain is not banned, but according to the current owner, he lost an adsense account on click fraud in the past, i dont know or adsense allways auto bans a domain if the account is banned.
Any input, or resources where i can do more research would be appreciated.
Definitely something you need to ask more questions. There are get paid to click or pay for traffic from emails that could be involved here. Does the site seem to be of high quality? Would you enjoy browsing around?
I cant tell for sure but if you think the offer is too good to be true, it probably is.
I would definitely drill down on the direct traffic and ask the current owner to provide as many proofs as possible on he has been able to generate the traffic. If possible, I would want him to tag these traffic so that the source and campaigns can be identified via Google Analytics.
And yes, I agree with @dvduval ; on evaluating the website based on the quality of its content. Is the content scraped from elsewhere? Would you recommend the website to a friend or colleague? Is the content indexed or ranked by major search engines?
Again, trust your common sense, if things look or sound too good to be true, they probably are. 