Every professional sport has pieces from its history that are considered collectibles or pieces of memorabilia that have or will have increasingly more value as time goes on. There are a lot of sports fanatics and collectible junkies that enjoy finding and collecting pieces of memorabilia from professional sports because they hold either an emotional value to the person or a historical significance that person finds intriguing. There are thousands of sources that sports memorabilia can be obtained from all over the globe but how do you really know what is truly authentic and what is just a replica? This blog will be detailing in steps how to identify that a piece of sports memorabilia is truly authentic and not just a replica. While there are a lot of different outlets that sports memorabilia can be searched for, I’ll be focusing on memorabilia that can be found via the web.
Step 1: Select a specific piece of memorabilia that you want to find
Usually when your searching for a piece of sports memorabilia on a search engine such as Google, its not uncommon to get hundred of pages that claim they have what your looking for specifically. Unfortunately, a lot of these pages will direct you to a replica or a similar piece of memorabilia from the one you were looking for. To get a more accurate search result from Google, select a specific piece of memorabilia that is only tied to one game, or one event. That way, if you have a specific piece of memorabilia in mind, you will be able to use specific keywords to help narrow your search and increase your chances of finding what your looking for.
Step 2: Narrow your keyword search
When finding a piece of sports memorabilia using Googles search engine, its important that your search has relevant keywords that through Googles search engine optimization, will narrow your search and the first page of results will display the sites with the best chance of having the exact piece of memorabilia that you are looking for. For an example, if you wanted to find a game used football from Super Bowl XLV, by typing in, “Superbowl 45 football” the top results wouldn’t give you a site where you could actually buy a game used football. For Google’s search engine to know specifically what your looking for, you need to give them specific information. By specific, its important that you give google the name of the event, the piece of memorabilia your looking for, and since your looking to purchase a piece of memorabilia, ending the search with the words “for sale” is ideal. With this in mind, a keyword search for a game used Superbowl 45 football would look something like, “Superbowl XLV game used football for sale”. When you type this keyword search in, literally the first result is an auction website that has a verified authentic Super Bowl XLV game used football for autction.
Step 3: Look for information on the site that verifies authenticity
When you click on the first result after narrowing and specifying your keyword search, investigate the website a little bit by looking for key authenticity versifiers, such as fact checking that the piece for sale first looks exactly like an authentic piece. For this example, try going back to Google and under the images tab search “Superbowl XLV”. This will lead you to the search results page shown below where there are action shots of the game balls being used where you can see if the footballs being used match the one from the auction site. Another way to verify the piece’s authenticity is reading the description to make sure the writing looks professional with no errors or questionable dialogue that might not historically match with that of the event. One last action you can make to verify authenticity is to make sure the price being asked from the seller matches or is close to the value of that specific piece. For a game like the Super Bowl, there are many different balls used throughout the game, so going back to Google and searching how much the piece of memorabilia typically goes for will further verify that the website you landed on is indeed selling you an authentic piece of memorabilia. After taking several measures, such as these to verify the memorabilia’s authenticity, you are ready to place your bid and go for the piece of memorabilia you’ve always been wanting to have.
The G.O.A.T. 