On the whole Internet, there are
approximately more than 150 million active websites up and running. As a
result, it often becomes a real challenge for the users to identify safe websites that are trustworthy and reputed.
Have you ever wondered to know the
reputation of a website before placing the order? Need to know whether a
given website is child safe? Well, here are some of the ways to
identify safe websites on the Web.
1. WOT or Web Of Trust (www.mywot.com):
WOT is a great place to test the
reputation of your favorite website. WOT gives real-time ratings
for every website based on the feedback that it gets from millions of
trustworthy users across the globe and trusted sources, such as phishing
and malware blacklists. Each domain name is evaluated based on this
data and ratings are applied to them accordingly. A snapshot of WOT
ratings for gohacking.com is shown below:
As shown in the above snapshot, the
reputation of each website is shown in terms of 4 components where green
means excellent, yellow warns users to be cautious and red indicates
potential danger.
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Trustworthiness signifies the overall safety of the website. A poor rating may indicate that the site is associated with threats like Internet scams, phishing, identity theft risks and malware. For more information on phishing, you may refer my other post on how to identify and avoid phishing scams.
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Vendor reliability tells you whether a given site is safe for carrying out buy and sell transactions with it. An excellent rating indicates superior customer satisfaction while a poor rating indicates possible scam or bad shopping experience.
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Privacy indicates about “to what extent the site respects the privacy of it’s users and protects their personal identity and data”.
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Child Safety indicates whether the content of a given site is appropriate for children. Site contents like sexual material, nudity and vulgarity will have a poor Child Safety rating.
In most cases, the WOT ratings are found to be highly accurate. To check the reputation of any given website, just visit www.mywot.com
type-in the address of your favorite website and click on “Check now”.
This tool alone can tell you a lot about the reputation and safety level
of a website. However, in addition to this, I am giving you another 3
handy tools to identify safe websites on the Web.
2. McCafee SiteAdvisor:
McCafee SiteAdvisor is a free tool that
is available as a browser add-on. It adds safety ratings to your browser
and search engine results. You can download it from www.siteadvisor.com.
3. StopBadware:
Using this tool, you can check whether a
given site is said to have involved in malware activity in the past. To
check this, go to SB Website Clearinghouse
and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on “Search
Clearinghouse ”. You will see the result something as shown below:
If you see a Red or Yellow icon (as
shown in the above snapshot) next to the search result, that means the
site currently involves in some kind of malware activity. If you see an
uncolored icon, that means the site was once involved in such activity
in the past, but not now.
If the search does not return any result, that means the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.
Even though StopBadware is a great
option, this factor alone cannot be taken as a serious indicator to
measure the reputation of a website. Many legitimate websites are also
found to have been flagged due to hackers uploading malicious scripts
and other bad content by compromising the site’s security.
4. Google Pagerank:
Google PageRank is another great tool to
check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool
rates every web page on a scale of 1 to 10 which indicates Google’s view
of importance of the page. If a given website has a PageRank of less
than 3, then it is said to be less popular among the other sites on the
Internet.
However, PageRank will only tell you how
much popular a given website is and has nothing to do with the safety
level of a website. So, this tool alone cannot be used to evaluate a
website’s safety and other factors.
PageRank feature is available as a part of Google Toolbar. You can download the Google Toolbar and install it to avail this feature.
I hope this post has given you enough information to help identify safe websites on the Internet. Waiting for your comments…
