13 Good Place to Buy and Sell Websites

From time to time I get an email asking where is a good place to go and buy a website. So I have compiled a list of good places to buy (and sell) websites.

Sitepoint: Now charging up to $40 for their most expensive listing but may be worth it if you expect your site to sell for anywhere from $100 to about $30K. Links to online auctions or external pages advertising your site for sale are not permitted
Search Engine Forums: Part of the big Jim’s World webmaster forums. Was down for a year or so, was moved, and is now active again. No Pr0n, casino, gaming or spammy sites allowed. Wanted ads welcome. No charge for listing. Our site provided the official guides on this forum.
Digital Point: This forum has become very active very quickly. Hosts both WTB and Site For Sale posts. No charge for posting. The rules are more relaxed here than at some other forums, and the moderation less rigid. 1000 PM limit so ample for most users. Probably the best bet for most lower value sites for sale. But a listing could quickly get lost here with the sheer volume of posts/threads on the average day.
WHT: Web Hosting Talk is, as the name suggests, not really a site dedicated to selling and buying businesses. However, the link leads you to a section on their forum where a lot of sites do sell. These tend to be sites costing under $10,000 with most of them under $2,000. Free to list your site or post a WTB (Want to Buy).
Geek Village: They definitely don’t like adult sites here. Posts limited to one free post every 30 days. Generally for sites worth less than $10,000. WTB allowed. Free listing.
Webmaster Talk: Not as active as the others, but still worth a shot. It’s a free listing for sale or purchase.
Domain State: Little known but at least as good as one or two of the others above. Free listing.
DNForum: This is a paid forum and the focus is more on domains than on websites. But, complete sites do sell here. Tip: You could save on the membership costs by buying DNF membership elsewhere. WHT (above) often has threads where people sell their “spare” memberships. Browse through there for a few days and you are bound to find one. DNF does allow adult sites to be listed buy you’ll have to be discreet in your wording of the title and the post.
Website Broker: Not a forum, just a marketplace. Has sites for sale listed by category so easy for buyers to browse. The fact that it charges for listings reduces the noise. The standard format offerings are presented in makes for easier comparisons across sites. At any given time it seems to have a fair few listings.
Sedo: One of the best known places for the sale and purchase of domains. Others are Namepros and Afternic. They use their own internal escrow.
Business forums (like Aardvark), and pretty much any other community of webmasters like V7N, a forum fast gaining popularity.
Daniweb: A developer forum so may be more suited to sites and domains of a particular nature. You need to scroll and scroll and scroll past the ads on every page before you hit content.
Last and least: Loot, Craigslist and other local classifieds. Note that in Loot, for example, you don’t want the “Internet Services and Equipment” section under “Businesses and Loans” but the “Opportunities” section. I would have given you a link direct to the relevant page if it wasn’t for their less than inspired navigation/URLs. Loot wouldn’t be my first choice and I wouldn’t list a site in there at all unless it happened to cater for people in a small geographical area (as Loot readers are generally looking for something in their backyard).

Adult sites:
Since adult content comprises so much of the internet, and most forums don’t allow the sale or listing of adult sites, it would remiss to not point out at least one location where you can list your over 18 content: gofu*kyourself.com. It has an active site buying and selling section. The asterisk is, of course, to mask the world’s favourite “F” expletive. Other “adult” webmaster forums, like just7blow8me dot com (remove the numbers) do also allow listings.

Other ideas:

Put a notice on your site itself. Create a page, put as much information you feel comfortable disclosing and stick a form on there for interested parties to contact you to find out more. You could maybe even get them to agree to your Non Disclosure Agreement (link coming) as part of the form.

If you don’t want your usual visitors to see it don’t link to that page from your homepage. You can give it an obscure link from the bottom of your sitemap or some other rarely visited page and search engine spiders will find the Sale page. If confidentiality is really, really important don’t list it on the site at all (as it could come up in a search for “Site:www.yoursite.com” i.e. a search that lists all the pages on your site). Ask a friend to host your page for you.

What words would someone looking for a site try in their favourite search engine? “Site for sale”, “Want to buy a site”, “Buy websites”? Or they may try to search on phrases that sellers are likely to have used: “This site for sale”, “Buy this site”, “Selling this site”. Optimise for those.