Traffic Domains: Income or Illusions?

by Chris Connor

Different domainers look for different things when buying domain names. Some domainers choose names for future development while others buy domains with potential customers already in mind. A third and ever growing group of domainers search high and low for domains with existing traffic. With existing traffic, you can park your domains at places like Sedo and Fabulous.com in order to establish a steady income stream. In fact, some domainers are even able to live off the income from their domains. That said, domains with significant traffic usually command high premiums among resellers.

How do you find domains that have traffic? There are a few ways to get an idea how much traffic a certain domain name may have, but not really a fool proof way unless you buy one and track the stats on it. Since traffic comes from either links or type-ins, you will probably get a great idea which to look for by simply looking at the name. For example, a domain like LabPuppy.com is not one that a person will automatically type-in looking for specific content but this domain happens to have a substantial amount of links. Thus, you would use tools such as http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to find out how many links, Alexa.com to see if the domain still has a traffic ranking, and PageRank.net to see if the domain has a Google PageRank or not. If the domain is generic like GameChat.com, you would go to  http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type in the individual terms (or term) together and the domain name. Using the GameChat.com example, the terms "Game Chat" yielded 5923 results while GameChat.com yielded 55 results. What this means is that Game Chat was searched for 5923 times last month on Overture while the exact domain was typed-in 55 times on Overture. In theory, you could expect at least 55 type-ins per month for that domain just using the domain results. A fraction of the 5923 could have typed-in the domain as well before searching for it on Overture. 

However, domainers should be extremely careful when buying domain names solely for traffic. Although the tools mentioned above are helpful, they can leave a lot of room for misleading potential buyers. For instance, I once bought two "traffic" domains because they had Overture results for the exact domain name. When I put those two domains on Sedo, I learned that neither one had traffic. Apparently in this case, domainers had been typing in both domains just to check stats on them. Furthermore, a domain with a ton of links does not automatically mean a ton of traffic if the links are on dead sites or in a place where nobody ever goes to.  Even a high ranking on Alexa.com or a high Google PageRank do not single handedly guarantee a great amount of traffic. Short of having actual stats from the domain, the best way to see if a domain has a good deal of traffic or not is to use all of these tools together as your primary guide to making a decision. If one indicator is high while the others are low or nonexistent, be very skeptical. 

Recently, a "traffic" domain dealer was exposed on a major domain forum for misleading other domainers in buying traffic names with very little traffic. A few domainers were even tricked out of hundreds of dollars because they thought they were buying domains that would yield steady income. The person in question went so far as to change his or her membership name a couple of times in order avoid a bad reputation from the members that were duped. Thankfully, that tactic did not work because the member was permanently banned from the forum. Thus, always keep this incident in mind when buying domains that are supposed to have traffic. 

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