Hello Steve,
The reason the domains are for sale, and the sites are taken down is because "apparently" the product i was selling was infringing on someones patent.
I received a letter from a patent attorney stating that my product (made by the same manufacturer as most of the others on the UK market) was infringing this guys patent. To be fair, i to this day don't think it was, however I looked into fighting it and it would have cost me £xx,xxx to fight.
Strangely enough, the guy who stated this, and instructed the solicitor was the same person who sold
www.electroniccigarette.co.uk to me about a month before. I would call that "entrapment" but again, weighing the costs up, i decided to pay the £2000 settlement fee for "damages" and agree to take down all sites and never sell electronic cigarettes "directly" or "indirectly" again. Case Closed!!!
Therefore, i had to take the e-commerce sites down, and put up the 1 page sites. Sure enough, the sites dropped due to no content.
I have all the paperwork to back this up, but wont be able to supply copies of this till 3rd Jan, as im in Lanzarote right now for xmas (lucky me)
I was in advanced negotiations with one of the companies who currently rank on page 1 of Google for "electronic cigarette" to buy the whole portfolio for £50k plus VAT, but today they advised me by email that they are unable to come up with the funds. again, I can prove correspondence (I could get all that for you as its via email) But i would ask you to sign an NDA if i was to show you that, and some kind of commitment, and i would probably have to scratch their name out (although no NDA was signed).
As far as Google ban is concerned, not that im aware of. They are all good exact matches, and should fly back up there with a little bit of indexing from Google. They had good content, and some very good links too.
With regards to the old sites etc:
All content on every site, page, product descriptions etc etc was 100% unique and cost quite a bit. I am happy to include the sites in the sale if you want. Again, wont be able to send these over till new year, and my designer is off till 3rd Jan, but can arrange for it all to go over then.
With regards to industry:
Im sure you know, its a massively growing industry, and NO PPC, NO AMAZON & NO EBAY. So the only way to get these online is through SEO sites & gift sites.
I ideally am looking for someone to buy the portfolio, but will consider selling individually.
As i mentioned, i was going to sell for £50,000 but have been let down, so am considering offers for the portfolio as near to that as possible.
Anything else anyone wants to know, then please let me know. I am happy to be transparent as long as people are not just "fishing" or "time wasting".
