A business contact of ours called in a few days ago with a problem — she got a complaint that her shopping cart was flagged as one that had a poor reputation, and that a potential customer was skittish about making a purchase.
As a Web site development firm, to be honest — we don’t get a lot of questions about this — but we should. Your Web site’s online Reputation is very important. Your rating with any of several services could make or break a purchase. First, let’s delve into why there are companies that track your reputation.
Back in the old days of the Internet, people would send email to other people and make purchases on Web sites. Sometimes, things wouldn’t go well — businesses would send unsolicited email to people, and there were allegations of fraud, identity theft or other bad things. Enter companies that track reputations — once several people complain about a site, the reputation tracking company tells others not to go there. Sounds great? It is.
Sometimes, a malicious user or a misunderstanding can lead to a complaint that isn’t proper. For example, a user could be upset with your product and let one of these companies that your products are unreliable. Or someone else can send out spam using your Web server and you could be tagged as an offender.
Next, we need to list out the major online reputation companies:
Stop Badware – This site is the least restrictive of the sites we reviewed. It just tracks to see if sites do really bad things — and if they do — it puts them on a list. That list is used by Google, so it will be important to make sure your site is not on this list.
SiteAdvisor – This is a service from McAfee (the anti-virus company). They test to see if your site serves malicious code, sends out spam, or does any number of other bad things. They also check to see if you link to other sites that are bad. They use a red-yellow-green system for tracking sites.
Web Of Trust – This one is similar to Site Advisor, though not used by as many people. This was the site our contact had called about.
Each of these sites allow you to evaluate your own site, and they give tips for improving your rankings. Most of the stuff is common sense, don’t spam — don’t serve malicious code. If you get on one of these lists, work with the vendor to get off the list — that way you’ll avoid spooking your Web site visitors.
