Beware When Buying A Myspace Or "Topsites/Top 100" Site

… because sometimes traffic to such websites is much lower than claimed by sellers.

A seller (whether someone is selling a site or links) will often claim a high amount of uniques, e.g. 20,000 per day, but in fact these are (mostly) not visitors to the site but rather as a result of hot-linking content (e.g. an image/flash file is used on Site B but hosted from Site A). This is a problem both so-called "Topsites" and "Myspace Resource Sites" have. Sometimes the webmaster will claim over-inflated amount of visitors without even realising that a lot of the visits are caused by hotlinking

"Topsites" contain a list of ranked sites depending upon how many times a visitor votes for a site. This is usually done by clicking the image link to the topsite. Each time the topsite image is loaded on Mr X’s blog (it is loaded from the topsite itself) this will be recorded as a hit in the webserver log file and software such as awstats and webalizer (which generate their stats from webserver log files) will interpretate it as a visit. This will give an impression of a greater volume of traffic than there actually is. A true measure of traffic will be from tracking service such as statcounter which works by having javascript embedded on the page and therefore will give a more accurate reflection of actual page loads.

"Myspace Resource Sites" have a similar problem because images and javascript are often hotlinked from the site to a Myspace profile so each page load of a myspace profile can cause a hit (or multiple hits).

If you are considering buying such a site, don’t trust stats which were generated from the webserver log file. Instead, ask for the daily impressions for Adsense, Adbrite, Yahoo! Publisher Network or whatever advertising network they use, if more reliable stats (from a service such as statcounter) are unavailable. Closely check the referrals … in particular for any search engine traffic from Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live.