What? You haven’t heard of WOT?
Well don’t feel alone because I hadn’t either until just a few days ago.
What Is WOT?
For those of us who have been in the dark about WOT, WOT is an acronym for Web of Trust. And Web of Trust it is a community site that provides evaluations of web site trustworthiness. The site launched in December of 2007 and now has:
* Over 23 millions users
* Free add-ons for several of the most popular browsers so you can always see the WOT traffic light rating as you surf
*A quick search to check a sites rating on the WOT home page for those who don’t download the add-ons
and it has
* Partnered with Facebook to protect users from scams and malware
Is WOT Safe?
According to the Web of Trust website wot.com has a red traffic light meaning that the site has a poor reputation. However …
wot.com is not the Web of Trust website.
The Web of Trust website is located at mywot.com and has been evaluated by the WOT community as a trusted site and been given a green light.
Before I joined WOT I checked out my own sites’ ratings and found all but 1 had not been evaluated. The evaluated site had been given a green light and since I wanted to claim my site I decided to join.
So far the site and the add-on I’m using seem safe. I haven’t noticed any adverse affects on my PC and I haven’t been getting a lot of email.
Although the site and tools seem safe I still have 7 issues with the way this community site works.
7 Issues With How WOT Works
1. The WOT badges and trust seals are pricy.
* Any site can get a site reputation badge that shows their site’s reputation in the WOT community for 29.95 € ($43.2178 US) a month.
*. Sites with a good or excellent reputation in the community can purchase a trust seal for 29.90 € ($43.1457 US) a month.
* Sites with a good or excellent reputation in the community can pay more, 49.90 € ($72.0057 US) to get a trust seal and have 25 pages of their site scanned for malware daily.
2. All members have an activity rating and you must rate thousands of sites to move from 1 level to another. I’m not sure what the purpose of this classification system is for other than allowing platinum members access to the mass rating tool.
3. The mass rating tool allows platinum members to rate and leave the same comment on 100 sites at the same time. I guess they figure you’ve paid your hours by rating more than 10,000 sites the 1-at-a-time way and are now entitled to group up to 100 sites and give them the same rating. Sounds a little spammy to me.
4. From what I’ve seen, many of the evaluations and comments are opinionated and not based on anything real. And sometimes the rating and comments don’t agree.
5.WOT does not disclose the number votes used to determine a sites rating. This means a low traffic site can have a red or green light when only 1 or 2 people have rated it.
6. If you decide to click through to a red light site, WOT no longer gives you the warning screen before you re-visit it. With all the cloaking and redirection done online, it would be nice if WOT gave you this warning for at least the second visit.
7. And while other site validation systems try to warn you about “adult sites,” WOT has given a green light to several of these types of sites.
So is WOT safe? Probably, but the better question is:
How Reliable Is A WOT Rating?
I’ll leave that answer up to you. Please leave your comment below.