Monday, March 14, 2011

Fall Out with WOT, (web of trust)

I used to have faith in WOT website ratings, I wrongly thought that it would be unbiased because it was written by the public and not an individual critic, however I personally had a bad experience when I asked for one of my sites to be reviewed, the site in question is one of four that I own, it has be live trading on-line for over ten years, with no comments / reviews / ratings, good or bad from WOT, two days after asking people to look at my site and give me comments, one guy was not happy with my P&P terms, he was not specific, but is a new member, with thousands of posts (very odd), he does not answer my emails so I don't know what the problem is / was. After I complained about this all four of my sites now have the red circle claiming my sites have a bad reputation; this is absolutely untrue, I complained to WOT and they say that they are simply a hosting company, this too is not true because they are also the software developer that allows one comment from one person to make all four of my sites as having a bad reputation, despite my having McAfee secure and ISIS certification and thousands of happy website customers.


I feel this guy is a professional complainer with so many reviews (nearly all bad) in such a short time, and does not discuss issues so his criticisms are not trying to be constructive

Here is the profile of the guy that criticises others whilst being anonymous, I would call that a hypocritical bigot



Having now been a victim of uneducated, inexperienced, amateur reviewers and vindictive kids I have read a lot about WOTon their forum and on the Internet, I have found many hundreds of people that had a similar bad experience and whom did not understand the WOT logic and had similar issues and confusion over bad rating on good, well reputed websites.

I wrote to McAfee about this because I was concerned it may effect my websites page ranking and they replied

"never heard of WOT so we don't think it's that important"

FirstFound said
"I see what you mean about the WOT site, but I recommend not worrying about this one at this stage.  I checked a few other pages and saw even some well trusted websites (including YouTube.com with 58 hateful/illegal contents, 62 bad experience and more) so I would say it says a bit more about their site than yours.

To be honest, I think it is simply down to lack of moderation - there is clearly no quality control on the comments and anyone seems free to say whatever they want.  (I've added a brief 'good' review this afternoon).

The Mcafee one is likely to be a bit more trustworthy, as people who have SiteAdvisor will see the green tick in the search results.  I have to admit I'd not heard of WOT until today, but I have been aware of SiteAdvisor for a couple of years, so this is definitely the one to watch.

I should also say that none of this will have any effect on Google or search engine rankings whatsoever, so is probably not something to become too concerned about for now, but any past customers who would be happy to give a good review on WOT may help to combat this slightly"

They seem to have many good sites with bad ratings and bad sites with good rating, here is a site (nothing to do with me) that gets a good rating, and yet loads of bad marks, still listed as a trustworthy site


So I am annoyed by the WOT comments but I am going to ignore them:-)

No comments: