Over the last 6-9 months, I’ve received a few reports that the crowd-sourced service Web Of Trust (WOT) reports my site as having poor reputation. I was pretty surprised, as regulars to the site might imagine. I was trying to figure out why it has a poor reputation. According to what I could find on the Web of Trust entry for my site, I found a few reports like the following:
- “Spamvertised Website! – This Domain is promoted through spam e-mail”
- “Involved in Spamming- be aware of using.”
Some of these comments refer to this site as a source for their dissatisfaction. However, when I did a search for my site name, I couldn’t find it in the list of blacklisted sites. Perhaps it has subsequently been removed. Still, the comments linger.
I was pleased and humbled to see that a number of people had gone to the WOT entry to comment that my site was legitimate and that the other comments were not accurate. I think that helps. At least now there is a note at the top of the site that I don’t recall being there before that reads:
Previous blacklisting by a trusted source may still affect this site’s reputation. Leave your rating to remedy this.
And therein, of course, lies the rub. I think crowd-sourcing is great, but when someone either maliciously or erroneously flags a site as poor, it becomes hard for the site owner to fix that directly. I’d hate for anyone to think that this site is spamming or is not trustworthy for some other reason. I can think of two things that might help to remedy this:
- Leave a rating at the WOT entry. I ask this of those who enjoy the site and believe it is a reliable place to visit–and who have not already left a rating there.
- If you have a problem with the site; if you think it is spamming or something, please feel free to get in touch with me directly so that I can investigate the issue and try to resolve it.
I’m hard-pressed to understand how the site might be sending spam. The only email that the site sends our are for people who sign up to be notified of responses to comment. That’s not to say that email can’t be hijacked. But I have pretty good security and spam measures on the site, and besides, if someone let me know about it, I can look into it.
In any case, I wanted to make everyone aware of this. People who use WOT might get warnings that this site has a poor reputation. I don’t think it is true, but how WOT rates sites is out of my control.
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Hi Jamie!
I’ve been researching about WOT and getting more and more disappointed about its rating system. I advise you to look at the forums and see if someone has posted a thread about your website as the community members rate websites en-mass based on lists posted on threads, not even checking if the information is true. It seems like a web-conspiracy. For more info refer to http://thundercloud.net/infoave/new/?p=818#comment-21416
Hi Vivi, thanks for the info. I’ll take a look at the forums.