If you are trying to teach people English you should have examples of your proficiency in English. Having an English version of your website does this. I can only see benefits to having an English version.

The rankings compared to traffic/revenue seemed reasonable, thanks for the tip. The site unfortunately sold for $3400 which was slightly above what I was willing to pay.

Oh well, another site should pop up soon enough.

Do you mind linking to the auction, now that it has come and gone? I'm kind of curious after talking about it.

Yeah, that was to be expected. A good rule of thumb is 10x monthly earnings. Anyway, yeah, that's about the best way I could figure it out. You should also check out the backlinks pointing to the site if you're interested in higher PR and traffic. A lot of people will point several high PR links at a site just to sell them and then pull them after. :-/

Edit: Yeah, I'd like to see that auction too. Thanks.

Sure.

https://flippa.com/2666849-100-autop...sense-earnings

I think that site is very lucky to make that much money. It's only ranking for the main keywords (and slipping, even from the time he posted the auction) and once Google gets their **** together to weed out the crappy and thin product review sites the party's over.

It has a lot of duplicate content (despite what he claims) and there's only 13 pages indexed, lol. I'm assuming he fears the inevitable and wants out while he can still get a good chunk of change.

Well it's more that Bing/Yahoo need to get their **** together, 3/4 of his traffic was coming from them. But yeah, heavy reliance on 2 keywords and slowly losing ground.

Figured I'd add more content to avoid going down with the rest of the thin content sites as well as start pulling traffic from related keywords which weren't targeted at all.

Not going to pay $3.4k+ for it though.

today i noticed a few visits on my analytics for a random finance site i own that recently broke the first page of SERPs for its fairly competitive EMD.

the referring link was a completely unrelated food site's "related links" page that has just 6 links, 5 of which are food related, and the 6th is my site's url. just like:

"http://thefoodsite.com/related-links (PR 2)

Related Links

1.) Other Food Site 1
2.) Other Food Site 2
3.) http://myfinancesite.com
4.) Other Food Site 3
5.) Other Food Site 4
6.) Other Food Site 5"

aside from being completely off-topic, thefoodsite.com is actually of reasonable quality, not plastered with ads, etc.

i've never bought links for the site and wouldn't do something so blindingly obvious. any idea what happened? could a competitor be trying to buy me some very low quality links or is that paranoid?

Google is also devaluing exact match domains more and more these days. They're still great, but not as powerful as they once were. The majority of my sites have dropped traffic tons. I haven't updated them in a year and I didn't build them with great content. I could turn a lot of them into better sites I think, but I think I'd rather sell them and start a passion site. I have a few ideas so far. It's so much better having a few cool sites you can put time into instead of a bunch of crappy ones you don't care about. I really wish I would've learned SEO/IM when I made good money from poker. I would've outsourced the **** out of my niches and been ballin'.

I have a near auto-pilot site that earned near $200/m last 3 months (coming up a bit shorter around $130 this month, not due to less traffic though, probably because of holidays). If I think of selling it I will drop you a PM. I'd want $2k minimum though.

This happens once in a while. It's almost certain that it's a dynamic list and your site was triggered accidentally depending on the filters for the list. You might want to check and see if it's even do-follow.

Buying links being a huge no-no is an overstated myth. How would anyone know if done right? Google catches people who have links from shady sites under a SPONSORS or COOL LINKS bar, next to 50 other sites on a bare PR page. Something like this wouldn't have ANY negative effects link exchange wise. If so, everyone's SEO budget would be to buy as many links to their competitors sites as possible. If your site pops up on a few crappy sites that link to you, the algorithm might ignore it and let it pass 0 juice. It's not going to get your site deindexed unless you're some ridiculous ****.

Feel free to PM me the link and I'll take a look.

Sure, just send a PM when you feel like selling it, or any others.

I had exactly the same four days ago, I'm guessing it was a slowfood site from Ottawa? Got 8 visitors in total from it who all bounced. No clue what they're trying to accomplish with it. Maybe they're just hoping that people link to it when they ask what's going on.

CTS it is very common to get random links it can be a form of other sites trying to spam for trackbacks, email spam the admin account send viruses. In my experience any negative value from links has been pretty much negated as it could be used as a tactic against competitors. The only thing you really have to worry about these days is getting caught actually buying links. Sounds like the food site may have been hacked.

Bit of a shameless plug but I did a blog post relevant to managing spammers:

http://www.scirra.com/blog/61/reducing-website-spam

Any feedback/thoughts would be welcome!

Hey quickly, does anyone have any data on when during the week is the best time to send an email to customers, in order to maximize sales? I'm helping a friend with sending an email out to everyone who has ever bought anything from him, and we want to make sure people read it at the time they're most likely to buy (ie. not Saturday night). I feel like I read somewhere that monday morning is good, but has anyone seen really good data on this?

Related: Friend has 150,000 email addresses of customers in a database. I am advising him to not send using his own server and to use a high quality 3rd party instead. What are the best choices for this? (remembering, these people cannot confirm their subscriptions or anything, we just want to go to a site, upload a file with all the names, and be able to send to them).

MailChimp seems to be popular for mass emailing. I was going to say that time of day wont matter unless you have a big list, 150,000 is a lot! Not sure on the data I'm afraid.

As a guess I would say early in a new month would be best as people have probably just been paid.

CTS:

I've experienced the same thing on a few of my domains. It's some type of referral spam. I don't understand how it works, but same sort of deal:

same url

same other links

My exact match product domain.

My guess is maybe it's to try to receive links in return?

I really have no idea though.

Some more info: http://blog.neuvians.net/2011/11/27/...back-scamming/

I like mim.io

You can't use scrapped email addresses either from manual logging or a bot crawler. And anything to an email like admin@, info@ or anything like this will be automatically removed as well.

You basically have to have had these users signed up through your website.

got posted to HN but page seems to be down know

Yeah went front page on HN for about 10 hours which is nice! Comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3300135 If you're a startup and get a front page on HN it's a ton of quite well targeted traffic. A couple of our other posts went front page as well. If you run a blog and write something interesting you should make a point of posting it on HN.

FPP Pro forums might need this information in the future

WOW! Now that is what I call spamming. It looks like it is just a couple of accounts doing all the damage. Man that is just crazy.

If you were interested in buying a website and the owner is open to offers whats the best way to get the ball rolling. Should I be getting the info from him and then offering or should I get him to throw the first ball and then get the information from him?

Also what kind of questions should I be asking him throughout this process?