“Your blog, thenetfool.com, is worth $64,357.56.” After taking a look at several of the so-called “best” website value calculators online, I have come to realize just how awful these ranking metrics really are! Many people attempt to use these estimating services to justify higher appraisals for their websites and blogs, and I admit that some services are more accurate than others. But hey, if you can find someone to buy theNetFool.com off me for $65,000… let me know! ;)

I mean to tell you, there is no service that works. I have gotten “appropriate” values ranging from $78 to $65,000… and I’m starting to feel that there is just no way to put a price tag on a website with a computer-generated system. By using rating metrics such as Technorati, Google Pagerank, Alexa and even Yahoo backlinks, these website value calculators are a hoax. Anybody trying to tell you their website is worth $X dollars is more than likely trying to rip you off!

Let’s take a look on some of the more popular services:

Business Opportunities Weblog - The Net Fool is Worth $64,357.56
The Business Opportunities website value estimator is, sadly enough, one of the more popular measuring services around the web. While I cannot narrow down the exact metrics, it is evidentially drawn from Technorati. My Technorati rating is generally high when compared to my overall popularity, I am just good at using the service to increase my rank. But this means that the door is open for anyone to do as I did and artificially inflate the price of their websites. The Business Opportunities service grossly overestimates the value of my website.

YourWebsiteValue.com - The Net Fool is Worth $4,200
The system used at YourWebsiteValue.com projected what I think to be the most realistic price of my blog site. I feel that it is about correct, but this is not to say that the value was just “luck of the draw” (as I believe it was). I think that there is a lot of room to fudge the results and get an over-priced valuation. They use metrics like “popularity” and “recognition” which I believe are essential, so I have to say this turned out the most accurate for me.

EstiBot - The Net Fool is Worth $2,900
EstiBot is a decently fair way to value both your website and your domain name. They start out by estimating the value of your domain name (mine is apparently $130), and then apply things like rankings from Alexa, traffic and keywords to work out the value of your website. Again, not terrible, but overly reliant on pre-recorded rankings that can be artificially enhanced, thus inflating your “value.” I feel that the service aims too low for my price reasoning, but may even turn out the opposite for you!

CyberWyre - The Net Fool is Worth $1,342
The measures used in the CyberWyre ranking system are nothing more than a combination of things like Alexa rankings, Google Pagerank, and average backlinks. Because of this, sites that spam their link will receive huge leverage over those that do not. The $1,342 price valuation isn’t too far-fetched, but definitely undervalues my website by a considerable amount just because Google hasn’t given me the value I feel that I deserve.

Smart Page Rank - The Net Fool is Worth $245
Just three factors come into play for the Smart Page Rank valuation service, your appearance in Yahoo or DMOZ directories, number of backlinks, and indexed pages. Knowing this, I think that too much of a weight is put on the directory appearance. The DMOZ directory is becoming more and more unreliable as a ranking tool, and getting a listing in the Yahoo directories entails a purchase upwards of $250! Unfair, and a gross under-estimate of most blogs, including mine. :(

Site Value Calculator - The Net Fool is Worth $225
Like the Smart Page Rank, the website value estimator at SiteValueCalculator.com involves just three metrics: Alexa ranking, domain age, and number of backlinks. Why they decided to use domain age is beyond me, as I feel this estimates the domain name, rather than the website itself. What’s more, Alexa rankings are only recorded if the users browsing your website have the program installed on their computers when visiting. With Google cracking down on paid and other unmerited backlinks, the Site Value Calculator is a poor understatement of the value.


Website Value Calculator - The Net Fool is Worth $78
This is pretty much the bottom of the pile as far as quality goes. The WebsiteValueCalculator.com measure of my website’s value was a virtual train wreck at a measly $78 dollars. Knowing that they identified more than 5.1 million backlinks to my website… to turn around and offer a double-digit value is a bit ridiculous in my opinion. They weight far too heavily on pagerank for their own good, so if yours is unjustifiably low (like mine), you are going to get a horrible calculated value.

As you can see, while some services work a bit better than others, they can all be manipulated to an extreme degree and do not take their own metrics into effect properly. The most common problem involved is a heavy reliance on pagerank, which means absolutely nothing in reality. My best bet was YourWebsiteValue.com’s value calculator, but even this was not too accurate.

The bottom line: if you see someone advertising a sale price using one of these services, they are probably trying to exaggerate their net worth. As a rule of thumb, you will need to use your own intuition combined with these figures in order to figure out what your are worth. ;)

-The Net Fool

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