Flippa lists more and more websites for sale every day and at times it can be challenging to identify the “diamonds in the rough”; those websites that fit your buying criteria. This post focuses on how you can use the Advanced Search feature to filter the website auction listings so you can find sites that fit your criteria.

Establish Your Buying Criteria

First things first, decide what your buying criteria is. When you’re looking through the website listings on Flippa, what grabs your attention? What are you looking for? Unless you’re specifically looking for niche domain names, in which case I recommend the tags functionality,  you probably use one or a combination of the following factors as an indication of value:

  • Revenue
  • Revenue Source
  • Google PageRank (PR)
  • Age
  • Traffic
  • Inclusion in Dmoz
  • Price range.

Using the Advanced Search functionality, you can refine your search by entering parameters for all these criteria.

Setting Up a Custom Search

Time for an example. Let’s say I want to find all the websites up for auction that have been established longer than 3 months, have a monthly revenue of $10-$50 and a PageRank of 1 or more.

We can build this search with the Advanced Search functionality, save it as a present search so I can run it again next time, and ask Flippa to send me daily email notification of websites fitting my criteria. Here we go:

  1. Set the Listing format and Auction Status. For this search I only want to include auctions and listings that are still open:
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.13.44 PM.png
  2. Set the Age range. In this case I’ve set the range to between 3 & 60 months to capture anything up to 5 years old. You could of course go higher.
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.18.35 PM.png
  3. Set revenue range & revenue source preferences. I haven’t selected a Revenue Source preference, but if you’d prefer to see sites that generate traffic predominantly from AdSense, for exmaple, then you’d select the “From advertising” box.
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.21.59 PM.png
  4. Listing Type. I’m only interested in websites for this particular search so I’ll leave domain-only listings unchecked.
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.24.46 PM.png
  5. Auction Price Range. I haven’t included a price range because I’ve set this custom search up to give me an idea of what multiples websites generating $10-$50 per month are selling for.
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.26.53 PM.png
  6. PageRank. Although a PageRank of 1 doesn’t really tell me a great deal, it will help weed out the sites with few backlinks and hopefully those with duplicate content.
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.31.12 PM.png
  7. Success Fees & Sort Order. I’m going to leave these as is but you might like to sort by price, ending time or one of the other options.
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.32.34 PM.png
  8. Save You Search. Name your customized search with something relevant so you can use it again later.
    Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 2.34.53 PM.png

Viewing The Results

As well as scanning through the listings, you can now Subscribe to these results and receive a daily email notification of new sites fitting this criteria.
adv_search_subscribe.png

Next time you come to Flippa, you can also click on the Preset Search drop down to view custom searches that you’ve saved.

A word of caution: Most of the search criteria I’ve used in this example references data that has been submitted by the seller. As always, make sure you do your due diligence before you decide to buy a website.