This auction for a Power Of Mind Control website caught my eye, mostly because of the decent traffic statistics. 28,345 unique visitors and 870,600 page views / month is quite good in my book. Each visitor is looking at an average of 30 pages!
Is the seller exercising some kind of mind control on his visitors?
The first port of call is SEMRush, where we plug in the URL and get the following:
PowerOf Mind Control
Oh my word! Look at those shocking search terms that brought visitors to this site (highlighted, and under the “Keyword” heading). If you can’t speak Francaise, I’ll do a bit of translation for you:
- zoophilie gratuite – free bestiality. Ye Gods, I swoon!
- sensitive pornograph ova – no idea but the second word looks like porn, and I don’t care whether it’s sensitive or not!
- foto scopate – swept photos? What with the earlier porn references, I’m thinking that any kind of photos on this site will be dodgy.
- adolescentes nues – nude teens. I’m getting the picture. No, I mean figuratively!
- voyeurfrance – I don’t think we need Google Translate for this one…
SEMRush is good in that it displays the URL that gets returned in the Google SERPs when someone searches for a particular term:
I’ll tell you why it’s good that the URLs are reported here. It’s because the owner of the site has actually removed those pages that show up for those search terms, or they are restricted viewing (see later). Whatever the reason, we can’t now see the pages on this site that rank for those terms.
Let’s click on the first URL in the list. This is the page that visitors find when they search for “zoophilie gratuite”. SEMRush helpfully inserts the URL into the search box at the top, where we can copy it and paste it into our browser’s address bar. We can see straight away that the URL is for a page on a forum.
When I try and load this page into my browser, I discover that I need to register on the forum to view the page. So I do.
However, the thread I requested is off limits.
This could be because it’s protected within a restricted area of the forum, or the owner simply removed the thread. Either way, there used to be several threads on this forum that attracted traffic from people searching for porn terms. In France. Those pervy frogs are at it again. I can’t see anything on the forum other than the usual paid to post threads that website sellers usually splash out on, and the inevitable spam.
SEMRush displays at the top of their keyword list the search terms that bring the most traffic. If all the top search terms are porn related, then the danger is that there won’t be much traffic left when the new owner gets rid of the dodgy pages. The new owner would have to get rid of those pages, because they are not “money pages”. No products get sold on them, they don’t lead to signups and there probably isn’t much ad revenue. The only benefit they give is to artificially inflate traffic stats. Which is good when you are trying to sell a site.
Flippa’s Crappy “Due Diligence Data”
Oddly, the SEMRush data that Flippa displays for this site is incomplete, and misleading. Here are the keywords that Flippa reports via SEMRush:
Where is the porn?
This is really weird. When I click on the More detailed information at SEMRush link, the porn keywords are presented, but Flippa is not showing them in their mistitled Due Diligence Statistics.
That’s piss poor, if you ask me.
Where are those watered down keywords that Flippa displays coming from? Ah, I see: Flippa only gathers SEMRush data at time of listing. Like I say, that’s piss poor. And why would the keywords change so much in the space of 24 hours, anyway?
My Favourite Search Term
My favourite search term that SEMRush reports is “mind control lesbian”. I just have this weird image of an army of lesbians surrendering their minds to a powerful hypnotic figure.
Come, disturbing army of lesbians, and do my bidding. There is much evil to be done. You can click on these ads for a start. Mwuhahah
The seller is a real gem. After seeing this post, he threatened to steal all the traffic from all the sites in the world to prove his mind control power. “Behold the loss of traffic in all Google Analytics accounts for November 2 2010, for it shall be mine! It’ll be a piece of cake using my zombie lesbians.”, he says. What a loser.