Traffic spread

Just like when it comes to revenue sources, we don’t want to put all of our eggs in one basket when it comes to traffic. A website getting most of its traffic to two or three pages is extremely volatile and something that we don’t want most of the time. Instead, we want a website that has a nice spread of traffic across dozens of different pages.

A couple of pages getting all of the traffic is volatile because if one of those pages loses its ranking, a website’s traffic can drop 50% or more in the blink of an eye! While if a website has a lot of different pages bringing in traffic, one or two pages dropping in rankings won’t mean much at all.

It’s very common on flippa and other marketplaces for website owners to get very lucky with one article and then sell off the website for an absurd amount of money without acknowledging that the success of the website is riding on that one article.

Verifying traffic spread is one way to avoid this common scam.

I do want to point out that it’s natural for websites to have a couple of articles that do better than others. Everyone happens to get a little bit lucky, and that’s totally natural!

I would say that my personal risk limit is a website with one article getting about 30% of the traffic, and the rest of the articles getting a fairly even spread of the rest. Even then, it depends on the quality and strength of the article getting all that traffic if I want to take that risk.

To give you some insight into my website’s traffic spread, my top pages are 8%, 7%, 6%, 4%, 3%, 3%, 2%, and so forth. Pretty good diversity there!