I’m always talking about the value of buying old sites. The most common question in response is “how do you find them?” Of course there’s a million ways to find them such as searching outdated directories (Y! Directory falls into that category and DMOZ is about there too) or checking the Wayback Machine. One of my favorite is to browse through the Yahoo directory as it existed in 2001.

But the easiest way that I have found for generating large lists of old sites in your niche is to first visit a handful of sites created pre 2000 and look for graphics that would have been common back then. Examples include the free stat counter graphics at the bottom of pages, award logos or certain animated gif’s that were popular back in the day (remember the guy holding the “WELCOME” sign?). Then, I’ll search Yahoo for all links pointing to the old link counter site or award site along with my keyword.

Here it is in practice (not the best example, but you will get the point). Lets first check the section of the Yahoo Directory from 2001 to find hit counter sites that existed in 2001. Then simply do a backlink check on Yahoo to find all of the sites that link back to the hit counter. Take this query as an example. If you want to limit results to sites that mention your topic, just insert your keyword in the query. Since the old fashioned hit counter went out of style several years ago, you can assume that the vast majority of sites linking to the hit counter are pretty old and that the webmaster might have lost some interest in the site and isn’t paying much attention to keeping it current. (Read: “Cheap”)

Then comes the hard part… chasing down a site owner with outdated whois info and with no contact information on the page. But that’s a post for another day.