Buying a domain that already has traffic — and checking it is real

Traffic can justify paying more for a domain. Very little of it usually survives the handover. That "10,000 visits a month" in the listing tends to decompose into crawlers, referral spam and clicks on pages you have no intention of keeping. The work before money moves is separating real visitors from noise, durable from perishable, and the ones worth something to your business from the ones that were only ever worth something to the person selling.

Five sources of traffic, five different half-lives

Visitors to a resale domain arrive from a small number of distinct places, and those places behave nothing alike once the name changes hands.

• Type-in traffic. People typing the name into the address bar. The most durable kind, because it depends on no page, no link and no ranking. Also the rarest. It clusters on very short, very literal names and almost nowhere else.
• Search traffic to existing pages. Real, sometimes substantial, and highly perishable. Rankings attach to pages and their link profiles, not to a domain in the abstract. Replace the content and the rankings tend to leave with it.
• Referral traffic from live links. Someone linked to a page in 2019 and people still click. This holds up, provided the target URL keeps resolving to something a human wants.
• Expired-content traffic. An old forum, plugin, app or product that used to live at this address. Frequently the biggest number in the report and almost always worthless to you, because the visitors came for a thing that no longer exists.
• Bots and spam. Crawlers, uptime monitors, scrapers, referral spam. Any log-based or server-side figure is inflated by these, sometimes by a factor of five or more.

Before you look at a single figure, ask the seller which of the five they believe they have. A seller who can't answer hasn't looked.

Screenshots are not evidence

Ask for read-only access, or get the seller to share a live session on a call. Roughly in descending order of how much each one tells you.

Search Console shows you what people actually typed

The single most useful artefact in the whole exercise. Impressions and clicks by query and by page, indexing status, and any manual actions sitting on the property. Read it for three things: which pages earn the clicks, whether the queries are commercial or merely navigational, and whether impressions have been flat or sliding across 16 months. A manual action or a history of spam makes the domain a liability rather than an asset.

A visit count without sources is not data

Totals tell you nothing. You want source and medium, geography, and landing pages. What should worry you: a wall of direct traffic with average engagement under two seconds, single-page sessions at almost 100%, visitors concentrated in a country with no plausible connection to the content, or spikes that start and stop like a switch being flipped.

Parking dashboards are the cleanest read on type-in demand

For parked domains there is no analytics tag, so server logs or registrar-level stats become the source. If the name sits with a monetisation provider, ask for the parking dashboard. It shows unique visitors, click-through, and revenue where there is any. Parking revenue is the most honest proxy for genuine type-in demand you're going to get.

Ten free minutes in the Wayback Machine

Look at what the site was at every stage of its life. A domain that spent 2018 as a gambling affiliate farm carries baggage you may not want to inherit. Check the backlink profile while you're there. A hundred editorial links is an asset; ten thousand forum-profile links is a cleanup project you'd be paying for the privilege of starting.

Make the two numbers agree

Search Console clicks should broadly track organic sessions in analytics. If Search Console reports 400 clicks a month and analytics claims 9,000 organic sessions, the story has a hole in it. Broken tagging explains plenty of these gaps and fraud explains some. Either way, you want the explanation before you pay.

Pricing traffic without kidding yourself

Value visitors on what they're worth to you, not on a generic CPM. Two methods, both crude, both an improvement on guessing.

• Paid-equivalent. Take the verified organic clicks on the queries you genuinely care about and multiply by what you'd pay per click for those queries. That's your annual media-equivalent figure. Now discount it by 50% or more, because rankings drop during migration and because a click on someone else's content is not a click on your offer.
• Revenue-equivalent. Where there's commercial history, ask for the figures and the underlying account, not a spreadsheet. Small content sites and parked domains generally trade at a multiple of annual profit, somewhere from the low single digits to the low teens depending on stability and how diversified the income is.

Be honest about where the value sits. On most premium names the brand value of the string dwarfs the traffic value entirely. A short, literal category-defining domain is priced on what it does for your positioning, your credibility and your paid-search costs over the next decade. Three thousand monthly visits are a rounding error against that, and paying a fat premium for them is usually an error too.

What breaks the day the nameservers change

Plan for loss. These are the mechanics that erode traffic after a sale.

• Content replacement. New site, new URLs, ranking reset. Clean 301s soften the dip; they don't prevent it, and recovery is rarely complete.
• No redirect map. You cannot redirect URLs you never saw. Crawl the site yourself before transfer and keep the output.
• Email and DNS cutover. Anything pointed at the domain besides the website — app endpoints, feeds, embedded assets — dies the moment nameservers move. Ask what's connected.
• Intent mismatch. They came for a free tool. You sell a B2B subscription. Real traffic, no value.
• Seasonality. One peak month is not a baseline. Insist on 12 to 16 months.

A sane working assumption: you keep type-in and brand-navigational traffic almost in full, somewhere between a third and two-thirds of organic search if you redirect carefully and publish comparable content, and close to none of the expired-content traffic.

Escrow gives you a window; use it

Never send funds against a promise. Transfers on Names.com run through escrow, so neither side pays nor transfers first, which hands you a natural window to run checks while the deal is live and the seller is committed. Order matters here.

• Agree price and terms in principle, subject to data verification.
• Get read-only Search Console and analytics access, with 12 to 16 months of history.
• Crawl and archive the live site, giving you both a redirect map and a content record.
• Open escrow. Confirm the registrar, that the domain is clear of any transfer lock, and who holds the auth code.
• Move the domain, verify control inside your own registrar account, then release funds.

If the traffic claim is doing real work in the price, put that in writing and make the price contingent on the data standing up. A seller who won't grant read-only access to their own analytics has told you what the traffic is worth: nothing. Price accordingly. Plenty of good names sell on the string alone, which is how keyword domains for brands get valued when there's no traffic in the picture at all. Treat that as the baseline and argue any premium up from there, with evidence.