WOT: Crowdsourced Web Safety

Web of Trust (or WOT) is a website reputation and review service that helps people make informed decisions about whether to trust a website or not. WOT is based on a unique crowdsourcing approach that collects ratings and reviews from a global community of millions of users who rate and comment on websites based on their personal experiences.

I’m embarrassed to say, I had never heard of WOT until I saw that JDM’s website didn’t have a rating on it when I was testing our website on a site scorer somewhere.

Since then, I’ve found lots of other 3rd parties that are using data from this human rated and algorithm weighted system.

Use Cases

People visit and do business with websites they trust. The WOT reputation database offers unique information on website reputations. A diverse group of companies use WOT data to enhance, improve and protect their users’ experience.

Facebook – Providing extra level of security
Using Facebook is part of many web users’ daily life online. Links posted on Facebook often become popular, even viral.

To provide its users with an extra layer of security against harmful links, Facebook uses WOT’s reputation data to alert users when they navigate to exterior websites that have poor reputations.

DuckDuckGo – Searching with peace of mind
The search engine DuckDuckGo cares about user’s privacy and safety, and wants to provide users with a worry-free surfing experience.

To protect their users from clicking on untrustworthy sites, DuckDuckGo has built in the WOT safe surfing option. The traffic light style WOT reputation ratings appear next to links, so users will be able to see immediately which sites are good, which are questionable and which to steer clear of.

Get Listed on WOT

Getting your WOT listing is free and easy.  Just register online and complete a short profile.

You won’t see any immediate ratings until users with the browser add-on installed rate your site, but, the only thing worse than having a bad one is not having one at all.  Just as an example, here’s JDM Digital’s WOT scorecard.