How Free Domain Appraisal Works
filed in Domain Sales, Name Appraisals on Mar.27, 2008
Well, many people are curious how much are their domain names worth. Over the years there have been many free appraisal services but only some have evolved into something valuable. To save you from wasting your time, I looked at six most popular free domain appraisal services and with a help of an example I will try to show you what works and what does not. Let’s crack on!
As an example we shall take two domain names we already know the value of: Offer.com (recently sold for $180,000) and Offers.net (sold for $7,500).
I would like to start with Swiftappraisal.com – an appraisal service that’s been around for ages. Its algorithm takes into consideration syntaxes, length and other visible attributes of a domain name. Eventually, Swiftappraisal suggested Offer.com and Offers.net would be worth $150,000 and $31,000 respectively. Hefty!
Domaintops.com initially was a nice evaluation service but due to Overture being stupid all the time (and Domiantop’s algorithm is based on Overture Keyword Tool), this appraisal service has ceased to work. Ah, whatever!
A tool I like is Estibot.com – it also takes keyword data and search term popularity as its basis, the main difference being that Estibot (has nothing to do with Estonia) is working. Now, Estibot thinks our example domains are worth $75,000 / $7,800 respectively.
Scriptidea.net/linkappraisal, Smartpagerank.com and DnScoop.com are three most popular free domain appraisal services to employ Alexa traffic data, PageRank, backlink, number of indexed pages combination to evaluate the domain names. To make it easier to read I will include the results in a neat table.
| Appraiser | Offer.com value | Offers.net value |
| Swiftappraisal.com | $150,000 | $31,000 |
| Estibot.com | $75,000 | $7,800 |
| Scriptidea.net | $4,024 | $22 |
| Smartpagerank.com | $1,334 | $56 |
| DnScoop.com | $107,985 | $22845 |
Now, you see that the average value of Offer.com comes to $67,668.60 and Offers.net – $12,344.60. Strange results. According to these free appraisals the new owner of Offer.com has spent too much and the owner of Offers.net has had a bargain. Where the truth stands? Somewhere in between. I would say that $180,000 sale price of Offer.com was a little exaggerated and Offers.net was almost spot on. After all, your domain is worth only the money you can make on it. If you cannot, you’ve spent too much.
The conclusion to this would be that free domain appraisal services are a nice idea, however they do not take into consideration the current market situation. Anyway, if you use more than one free estimation service and then draw the average price, you will get the basic idea of how much your domain name is worth. Another option is to participate in forums to get free domain appraisal.
More resources to explore this topic:
- An article about free domain appraisal forums.
- Our initial article about free Swiftappraisal services.
March 27th, 2008 on 10:31 am
To my opinion, Swiftappriasal is just a bunch of clowns. I have tried to appraise some domains and the prices they give are ridiculous!
March 28th, 2008 on 5:11 am
Offer.com and offers.net were both sold at too high a price. I think they will never make up for the money spent.
May 9th, 2008 on 8:54 am
[...] suggest you read the article about how free domain appraisal works where we discuss online software and bots dealing with domain valuation. Post a [...]
June 4th, 2008 on 8:30 am
Good luck is often with the man who does not include it in his plans…
November 24th, 2008 on 11:51 am
Domain Tops is a waist of time! Estibot over estimates but gives you useful information. Nameboy (i think its called) gives an accurate estimate in my mind. I normally do estibot and nameboy and compare the two.