Pardon me while I drill down a minute. The value of a domain name is primarily driven by two factors: its resale value and the value of its traffic. Those aren't necessarily separate. For most domain names, resale value is a function of a name's traffic. So at point of sale, a buyer is very interested in current and historic traffic. What exactly is "traffic"? It's the sum of type-in traffic plus linked-in traffic plus search-referred traffic. When you consider that, owing to Pagerank, search-referred traffic is itself a function of linked-in traffic, linked-in traffic is an incredibly important factor when appraising a domain name.

Which brings me to today's meditation: how do you evaluate the quality of the linked-in traffic on a name up for sale?  

In one category, I'll put the links from archives. These are links you can be reasonably sure will stay for more than three years. (I picked three years out of thin air -- it's just hard to think about anything on the Internet in terms longer than three years. I view three years as a very long time in Internet time.)

These "archival links," as we'll call them, come from places like, well, archive.org or old usenet posts or any site that maintains records forever a very long time. 

In another category, at the opposite end of the spectrum, I'll put the links from sites controlled by the current registrant of the name that's up for sale. These are "weak links." These weak links are coming down as soon as the domain name is transferred. Historic traffic generated by weak links should be assigned almost no value by the buyer in a domain name transaction.

Finally, I see a vast middle ground of user-generated links. Let's call these "organic links." They've developed organically over time as users liked what they saw on your web site and decided to link to it. These organic links not only drive traffic but they also are a critical factor in your site's Pagerank. I'd like to know more about these organic links.

What I'd specifically like to find is the average rate of decay of an organic link.

In other words, how long will these organic links be sending traffic to my web site? What's the shelf life of an organic link? If you want to fairly value a domain name, this is something you'll want to know. 

I've started the research, and while I can find loads of literature on the fact of link decay and the observation that link decay is a problem (a problem, that is, for researchers, academics and librarians), I can't find anything quantifying the problem. These two articles come close (one | two), but they focus on links from academic journals, not the web generally, so I question the value of the data for domain valuation purposes. 

Something to study. 

Helpful results might look like this: "The average organic link remains fixed for 2.8 years. 90% of organic links remain in place for at least 6 months. 75% are in place at one year. 40% are in place after two years...." I made that up, but you get the picture.

So what are the real numbers? 

 

 

Tags

See All Tags Add New Tag...

Appraisal  Archival Links  Domain Name Valuation  Link Decay  Organic Links  Traffic  Weak Links 

Powered by Joomla Tags

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment