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4 Ways to Identify Safe Websites on the Internet
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.
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.
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.
Privacy indicates about "to what extent the site respects the privacy of it’s users and protects their personal identity and data”.
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 http://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch
and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on "Search
Clearinghouse ”. If the search does not return any result, that means
the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.
4. Google Pagerank:
Google PageRank is another great tool to
check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool
rates every webpage 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.