So you have found a site on Flippa, you’ve read the site description, had a look at the Flippa due diligence report, and you are still interested in bidding. Before you start bidding away there are some due diligence checks that you can complete on your own, because despite Flippa doing their best to stop scam and BS sites, there will always be those that slip through the net.

The following list is by no means everything that you can do when compiling your own due diligence, but they are the key ones that I find work to gather enough information as to whether or not the site is worth my investment.

• Have a look at the sellers Flippa profile. You can see how many sites the seller has sold previously, as well as any feedback.
• Google the full URL of the site. If the site does not come back in the SERP’s then chances are that the site is either relatively new (which may go against what the seller is claiming) or it’s been banned from Google.
• Google the name of the site followed by the word scam and see if anything comes back from that. If you have the sellers name then you should always run the same check on them as well.
• Make sure that the Seller can give you full access to their Google Analytics (or whichever traffic monitoring method the seller is using) so you can check the traffic for yourself.
• Ask for verification of the seller’s revenue claims. It is possible that the seller’s claim and screenshots of the revenue earned from the site may actually be coming from other sites which aren’t included in the sale (for example with AdSense revenue).

If all of these add up and everything seems genuine then in 9 out of 10 cases I will then carry on and bid on the site. If not depending on how much the research turned up I will either do a little more digging or just leave it.

This last tip isn’t completely practical as it depends on your location, but if you can have a face to face meeting with the seller. You should only really do that if you find that the seller is local to you, or if the value of the website is high.

*Another useful resource which you can use is www.moreofit.com, which gives you a list of websites that are similar to the URL that you enter. While this isn’t particularly helpful in finding out whether the site you are wanting to bid on is genuine or not, it does give you some idea as to what your competition will be if you are successful in buying the site on auction.