The other day I had coffee with a few seo friends and one of the guys mentioned the company he sold his site (Income store) got its assets frozen by SEC and was even named a Ponzi scheme.
That got me curious. How a company with so much capital and assets can go down this hard?
I already knew the domain name my friend sold them. I asked a bit on Facebook and from then it was easy.
I used the Reverse IP Lookup tool that we made to check what other domains were hosted on the same servers.
Seems like these guys are hosting a lot of their domains on several IPs on LiquidWeb.
I ran the list trough Ahrefs and the ViewDNS historic IP to check for server movements and I found easily 192 domains from the Income Store network.
It is a big collection of affiliate sites Income Store has bought in the past several years in multiple niches like pets, health, garden, parenting, tech,sports etc. Most of it was monetized with Amazon.
Here is some interesting data from the domains:
There are 192 domains in total.
The shortest domain name was only 5 characters but the longest was 27 (without the tld).
The most common tld is .com
Most of the sites were registered between 2-3 years ago. But this varies a lot. Most of the domains younger than 2 years had no content or almost 0 traffic tho.
An interesting note is that they purchase assets for a lot of cash, but they have not paid the domain fees for too many years ahead. Most of the domains will expire in 2020.
Here is a word map of the most common words used in affiliate sites domain names. I broke down the words with this useful tool and made the graphic with this.
Now the interesting part – why Income Store failed?
I ran the sites trough Ahref’s batch analyze tool and it return interesting results. The largest portion of Income Sore websites were with 500 or less traffic a month and only a few sites seemed to generate the largest portion of their affiliate income. Here is the chart:
Then again, I already had 3 domain names that I knew a lot about, including the sales price.
So it was a big surprise to me to see that a domain name they have paid closed to 6 figures for has expired:
Here is its organic traffic:
The second domain I knew about was bought by Income Store for 5 figures, and what a surprise, I had server misconfiguration:
Here is its organic traffic:
As you can see from this chart, nobody bothered to fox the config file for this site for 5 months now.
Now the last site I knew about was bough for 6 figures and was one of the top performers they had by traffic in their portfolio.
You would imagine that such a big investment would be maintained well. Even if the site is a huge authority in its niche, a lot of its top links are not there anymore. Because someone forgot to pay for the domain names on the PBN network. (click the image to open it, since it is quite big. You sill can’t see a whole lot, but the red dots under the links say it is no longer there. So you get the idea.)
Needless to say that the best articles still had 2019 in the titles. The last blog post was still from 2019. And they have not build a single backlink to the domain since they bought it. But let a lot of powerful links drop.
And the results are clear, even a powerful quality niche site can drop and will drop if not maintained. Here is the traffic:
You can see the obvious dip at the end and I am wondering how will this continue now that the Income Store assets are frozen.
The case with these 3 domains is not the exception however, it is the rule. I checked quite a lot of their domain names and the picture looks the same everywhere. Just some started dropping earlier than others:
The business model of Income Store was not sustainable from the beginning. They bought a domain for 30x-40x but then did not allocate any resources to maintain it and the traffic and income dropped multiple times. Which made their websites loose money and they would not get the investment back in a long long time.
If someone had access to the data before and looked at the charts they would know this company is going downhill.
Conclusion
Affiliate SEO is not the passive non risky business that some people dream of. It is actually a very high risk investment and needs constant work.
You need a team of experienced marketers to maintain your websites healthy and get them back if they get kicked by a Google update.
It also requires constant work in improving and updating the content and building links.
Give us domains names!
It is about to be investigated and I don’t want any liability. Also, I promised to the people who gave me info on their domains not to reveal them, since they had contracts signed. I have outlined in the article how I found them tho. If you know a few domain names, you can easily find them all on your own 🙂
Makes you wonder what the hell they spent the $75M they took in? And only paid out $9M to investors.
How did you quickly shuffle through the 100+ domains?? And did you bought the expired one?? – LOL
SQL is fast. As for the expired one, not how it works. There is a grace period and if they don’t renew it, it’ll go at auction. Not my niche tho, so not interested anyway.
Investing into digital assets is the best investment you can do at present IF you understand how to maintain and better still improve. But yes it is a nightmare investment if you think its maintenance free. Check out https://www.fatrank.com/invest-into-digital-assets/ and I have hundreds of successful investments
Hey George, good analysis. I sold them 3 sites in 2013 in one sale and they only added like 20 posts to 1 site in the last 7 years and nothing to the other two. They all still have 2013 all over the posts. I was always confused on why they never did anything to them and I thought I got a really good price for them when I sold.
Going to put my old domains on watch and try to pick them up if/when they expire 🙂
Yep. So much resources go to waste. Seems to me they did not have any team that manages the assets and only had sales.
There’s no way this logic for looking up domains makes sense. I’m an income store investor with a group of other investors. We gathered nearly a third of all sites IS owns, and using the Reverse IP Lookup tool, I get hundreds of junk .cn and .tk domains, way more than we were every aware Income Store owned.
Depends what tool you are using on what IP address. There are no junk domains in my list. You can see the tlds listed in a table. However, I found only 192 domains. There could be and are more domains that have expired, so they ll not be on the current records. There are still ways those to be found, but it ll be a lot of time and not the point of my article.
It was mostly an example to the affiliate seo community that sites are not a passive investment and are very risky too. Especially if not managed well.
Anyway, if you have further questions on the methodology, drop me an email or give more details here in the comments.
Also, there are patterns. Like, they use the 2 same cookie plugins(one or the other of course) on every site.
After reading your article, just shocked. boss! your investigation is stronger than FoxBusiness (based stroy).
I’m using Ahrefs for confirmed sites owned by hundreds of investors, and then using the Reverse IP Address Lookup tool from your article. The majority of IP addresses produce hundreds of junk domains, so they must be on cheap shared hosting.
You are looking at the wrong IPs. All of the domains I looked up are hosted on LiquidWeb (which is actually a good premium host)
George, I have the LiquidWeb IPs as well, that’s their Canadian host. Only a handful of sites of the total site pool are hosted on it though. The majority of others IPs (about 90% of the IPs from the list of 300 sites confirmed by investors) are hosted on cheap shared hosting along with hundreds of junk domains.
So I’m not looking at the wrong IPs.. it just so happens that the analysis above is on less than 10% of the total of sites owned by Income Store’s site partners…
Could be. Do they have 2k domains? That would explain the poor management. Did you look for the pattern I told you about (with the cookie plugin?). It ll be easy to a developer to write a script and check all the domains on the shared IPs for it and then eliminate the junk.
Or if you send me a few IPs I can take a look.
Also, all the shopify stored (that IMO are junk) are under 1 IP that shopify uses and it has 1.4 million domains. So if you want the shopify stores, you ll need to find the exact domain names. (I doubt it they are worth much tho.)
This is the message for one of their IPs… so clearly shared hosting.. and yes, they owned many domains…
“We found 639,159 domain names on this IP address. You can see an excerpt of 1000 domains below.”
That doesnt sound like shared host to me. They usually keep it caped on max 3k. Could be GoDaddy (I have seen them do this) but I am pretty sure this IP belongs to SquareSpace. It is another e-commerce platform like Shopify. I would not but big hopes there though. Those are brand new e-com sites that have no value beside the domain name.
The real assets are the affiliate sites. They have content and links that are worth something to the community and history of making profit. Now they will cost cents on a dollar tho, because they were poorly maintained and lost their traffic big time. They ll need a lot of work to be back at what they were making.
But anyway, if you are looking for something to salvage, I would forget about those 400 e-com stores and focus on the affiliate sites.
Very interesting insight George! Never knew about these phonies until a FB post in a group brought me here. Great intel. Cheers
PS, is it worth getting some?
What do you mean?