“Your blog, Jimvesting.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 – Jimvesting 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 – Jimvesting 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 – Jimvesting 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 – Jimvesting 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 – Jimvesting 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 – Jimvesting 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 – Jimvesting 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.
-Jimvesting
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Hi Jim,
nice post about this. my blog has similar value to yours at YourWebsiteValue.com, hehe… hope both of us will get at least PR1 in the next update
BobbyT’s last blog post..Disclosure policy: Do you disclose or not?
@ Bobby: Forget PR1… I’m looking to take Google’s spot with a perfect 10
haha… you start at the top and look at the values and think ‘Yes, this is why I started blogging’ haha, and then you get to the bottom and go ‘Why do I even bother’
Thomas Sinfield’s last blog post..Blog Design Critique Please!
@ Thomas: Haha, that’s exactly what I thought. The link to the $65,000 was the first one I came across. Thinking it was fake, the next one I saw valued me around $100, what a slap in the face
Great post. I really liked it. It’s funny how these calculators give you such high estimates that you don’t believe. It’ll be funnier if someone actually sells their site with this kind of price tag because they used an online “How much is my blog worth?” calculator
Trevor’s last blog post..7 Tips To Managing Work and Blog From A 13 Year Old
Heh, YourWebSiteValue.com listed my Zero and Up as worth $21, while they listed another site of mine as worth around $700.
By the way, 5 million back links is quite a bit! Congrats on ringing in that number there.
Zero and Up’s last blog post..FeedBurner Isn’t Always Accurate
I have never believed these kind of sites. My site was listed at $100 bucks on some of these and to be honest, looking at my site I would not pay more then 5 bucks, but thats because it is still new and sucks haha
Scott’s last blog post..Chase Tatum: Former Wrestler Dead from Drug Overdose
You forgot to misvalue your website with DNScoop!
Max Miroff’s last blog post..Top Ten Reasons This List Won’t Be Popular On Digg/StumbleUpon/Generic Bookmarking Website
@ Zero: I don’t even know where the 5 million backlinks came from. Obviously, I can’t believe that it is true, but then again… you’d think it would be lower than real if they were lying
That is quite some spread! I got quite a good a laugh at this one, and from reading the comments…especially “its new and sucks haha” LOL. Well, I can relate to that one. I won’t even run one of those things. Maybe in another 6 months or so. Great post!
Jacqueline’s last blog post..Tools For Your GPT Toolbox
Jay, you should e-mail the guy behind Business Opportunities Weblog and pitch your blog to them for a mere $60,000. This is clearly a bargain according to their system
Fidel Betancourt JR’s last blog post..EXPOSED: The 10 Most Expensive Make Money Blogs on EntreCard
@ Fidel: Haha, that’s not a bad idea! I’m sure they’ll accept… unless they don’t want the awesome savings
(Jim, not Jay btw 
)
Lmao sorry bro, I just got off the phone with a buddy named Jay and wrote down his name instead. Lmao I need some sleep. Goodnight man. (Feel free to edit to your real name James, my apologies for that)
Fidel Betancourt JR’s last blog post..Day 4: 30 Days to Blogging Success
Well I do not believe in all of those.I hate this Business Opportunities Weblog way of telling of worth of blogs.Mine from him is 2258$ . http://www.websitevaluecalculator.com/ says my blog worth $78 .Is not is same as yours.I feel its somewhat fishy. EstiBot says its 330$ .I like it as it got my daily visitors right,got my domain right and a keyword too.This is the first time I am commenting this big.
Agent 001’s last blog post..The Come Back is So Good: Review and Offer
You can also look for your blog potential value with Feed analysis at blog perfume:
http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/
Btw… You had a great increase in feed subscribers from yesterday till today!!! great
Hugo Santos’s last blog post..Find yourself a confortable workbench to blog
The closes to an accurate evaluator is DNScoop.com
But obviously there isn’t a way of getting a super accurate evaluation from a script. But DNScoop does the job pretty well if you’re looking for an idea.
Nick Sullivan’s last blog post..Zac Johnson Interview
Hey wow dude, you were just at 39 feed readers yesterday, how did you get 67 today?!? Amazing!
Richard’s last blog post..BULLS vs. BEARS, MY PREDICTION
hahaha this is really a fun post!
I posted on hacking the business opportunities widget a few weeks ago, setting the value at 1,000,001 dollars and somebody actually contacted me, asking about how I made my blog worth that much… too funny!
I am off now, checking just how much my blog is worth
Mirjam’s last blog post..I Bounce You Bounce – Check your Rates!
Hi, I am the owner of yourwebsitevalue.com … thanks for giving my site some good notes.
It is true that the automatic estimator is often non-precise. But I worked really hard to make it “fair” by incorporating as many data from as many sources as possible.
Understand that we do not estimate the business value. Only the website. And if the website is brain-new, we may not have enough information to judge it correctly until the website have some life.
I really appreciate your comments.
http://www.yourwebsitevalue.com/
@ Richard: I was actually above 37 readers, I just hadn’t allowed the system to update… whoops!
@ Nick: I agree, DNScoop is a pretty good variety on these!
@ Eric: Thanks for visiting this blog my friend, your service is among one of the better way-off predictors, haha, but I agree that these things are very hard to estimate.
Using the factors that have determined real sales at SitePoint.com lets take a look.
PR0
Feed Readers 63
Technorati 141
Alexa 347,839
No custom theme (John Cow is not custom)
You may be looking from $500 to $1,000
Based mostly on the look and your Technorati
The fact that you have no Alexa traffic and no Feed Readers kills any real value the Blog may have.
Vic’s last blog post..BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2008
I’m workin on it, i’m workin’ on it!
70 readers isn’t much of a joke though, and my Alexa rating has been on the move for awhile now. Hopefully Google will lend me a hand in the next PR update
If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.
Hey Jim, great article, and i fully agree that you cant rely on such calculators, they are just not trusthworthy enough, anyways great article.
I wanted to post some success I have had with this new domain name appraisal website. I buy, develope and then sell 5-6 websites per year. Generally I get a domain name appraisal to see where I should price it. The various ‘free’ ‘robot’ appraisals can vary by thousands of dollars. My last 3 sites I have been using WeValuer.com as my main domain valuer and they have been within about 15% of the actual selling price on Sedo. Though I could pass this on. Good luck to everyone!
The difference in those prices are staggering,
I thought I would add another one I came across Blog Calculator which I thought was a pretty good one as it asked a few more questions. Bloggers should remember that these tools are for entertainment and they are only useful really for comparing two sites against each. A blog is only worth something when someone actually hands over the cash for that amount.
Good for people to know.
You should also consider http://www.websitefact.com , maybe not so accurate but they have a lot of useful info on how well your site is performing!
Hi! http://www.estimix.com is a great website traffic and value estimator, too. It provides trusted information, helpful for an objective human analysis. I trust that you’ll find this very useful.
waoo great post for the sharing of resources
ı am trying very much but my own web site still not much has value why