Web Of Trust

Business
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Hi All,

Just wondering does the organisation WOT (Web of Trust) have any kind of bearing on a websites overall SEO position. The reason I’m asking is because a couple of years ago I purchased two domains from someone, I have been developing the domains ever since. Just wondering, however, does WOT have any kind of bearing on any of the websites SEO, Google Rank etc?

The website was reported as being SPAM.

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I’ve only really starting using WOT two days ago thanks to a friends. Bad websites are probably known by Google as being bad and therefore linking to such sites would affect your SEO in a negative way. If WOT knows it’s bad then I don’t see why Google wouldn’t. This is all speculation, but SEO IMHO is mostly common sense, and it makes sense have an impact on your SEO.

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Hey All,

I don’t mean to sort of push an old post to the top, but I have been working on trying to get my domain name a better reputation as shown on WOT (Web of Trust), yet for some reason my comments on the website have been disagreed with and the site is still being seen as SPAM. Any ideas on how to go about sorting this out??

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I’m sure you can contact them and ask why they think so and try to reason it out.

Google does have some tracking on bad websites…I once received a message from Google that a search result I was opening is known to have malware, etc. I was very impressed :smiley: (If you’re dying to know, I set a restore point and explored it to see what was going on)

~TehYoyo

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There is a section on the website which says “Review my site” - http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/5

Hope this helps

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Hey,

Looks like the reputation is on the rise… I will battle this one out… as by the looks I’m not going to get much sympathy from people on the WOT website Have requested a site evaluationa and will also look at how else I can increase the domains reputation!!!

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I checked a website on webutation.net (useful for checking credibility of websites that I use for research) and, below the rating, there is a link that says ‘Website owner? Click here!’

I assume that that is how you contact them.

Good luck!
~TehYoyo

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Taken from google search :).

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I tested their tool in the bottom-right of the site - it turned out to be much faster than their mother site, Webutation (which, interestingly enough got a lower score than Sitepoint). Just out of curiosity, I searched and got [url=http://i.imgur.com/jGKp9.jpg]this. Quite interesting, in my opinion. But then again, legality doesn’t have any relation to trustworthiness. Although child-friendly? Eh.

~TehYoyo

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For some months now, Google has been trying to detect malware on the sites in its search results. If it thinks a site is affected, it displays a note to that effect on the results page, and tries to contact the site operator so that they can take action.

Google don’t say how they detect malware, but it’s unlikely to involve WoT in my opinion. WoT aims to rate a site’s reputation among a community of users. It’s not specifically concerned with malware, which is often beyond the immediate control of the site’s operators.

By all means use WoT if you plan to have dealings with a site (if you are thinking of buying a product from them, for example), but, when it comes to SEO, there are more important things to worry about.

Mike

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I’m quite sure Mikl’s right and Google’s detection has nothing to do with WoT. One of my sites was hacked and additional content (rather than malware) added. Google picked up on it and correctly identified it as the result of hacking, while WoT (fortunately) failed to notice anything amiss.

I say “fortunately” there, because WoT ratings are based on user reports. Of course people will report sites where they have a bad experience, but there doesn’t seem to be a system to review the rating. Some sites that are rated as “very poor” turn out to have had a malware problem (possibly the result of hacking) several years ago, and are now perfectly safe, but the rating has never been updated. You need to bear that in mind when using WoT. It’s a useful tool for advice, but interpret that advice sensibly. :slight_smile:

To get back to the original question, I agree with Mikl that WoT is not relevant to SEO.

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I claimed my website yesterday, requested a site review and within hours had a score.

The system is community based, and I believe it is actual humans that visit your site instead of robots, so it has that benefit as it would be easy to fool a robot.

I don’t think it is widely used, so I would not worry too much if your site has a bad reputation. I certainly did not do it with SEO in mind either, just for fun to see what score I would get.

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