Many of us spend a good deal of time online – marketing, listing properties or products, blogging, social networking or just surfing the web. It’s that last one that can cause some problems.
When you conduct a search for something on the web, how can you be sure that the site you are about to visit is free of malware, viruses and worms or actually has the content you are looking for – not just another Viagra ad or surprise porn?
And how do you influence what your kids see when they click try to visit a site or a link on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP)?
Web of Trust (WOT) is a community-powered web rating service that I wrote about in Safer Surfing – That’s WOT it’s about at BobStovall.com this morning.
They give you a free add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. Once you’ve installed the add-on, every website you visit and every Google search result will display the WOT “donut.”
(If you use Safari or Opera, there is a bookmarklet that you place in your bookmarks toolbar. Clicking it brings up a window in which you can rate websites.)
If enough WOT members have visited the site and rated it (on trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety) the WOT donut will show green for highly rated sites, yellow for sites with some reservations and red for sites you should avoid.
One great feature – if the child safety rating is low, you can use WOT to block viewing the site.
You can even see a site’s rating before you go there as WOT ratings will show up on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here’s an example of a search term that tends to draw red flags.
If you or your company have a website or blog, you want to ensure that you have a green rating for all four rating criteria. One idea for doing that, is to get your WOT add-on, rate our website – then, add your website’s URL in the comments below and ask other readers of this post to rate you.
Because there is no influence over others rating your URL, we don’t have to worry about bad sites wasting our time asking us to rate them.
You can get your WOT add-on at the Web of Trust Downloads page. While you’re there, take a few moments to find out how the system works and how you can put it to work for you.