Online Extortion, fake rating system done by their own employees and owner

Mysterious, fake rating "algorithm" that gives weight to their own employees or owner Sami. But conveniently they offer a paid service to get their "seal of trust".
They determine who gets what rating, so is not an honest rating site.
Many online reviews touch upon them and expose their tactics.

http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7809_102-5051738.html

http://www.affhelper.com/mywot-reviews-exposed/

Offers No Protection and Purpose is to Slander Reputations

Offers no protection and moderators enjoy making false claims and lies about business in their forum. If you try fight, they will just hurt your reputation more. Their moderators basically decide if your website is harmful or not by pure choice. No facts. They take joy in marking websites as harmful. There is nothing you can do to improve your rating once marked. Their support has no assistance, and the only time I hear from them is when they try and hide these reviews.

MyWot is a horribe, horrible company

Complete trash. Lots of complaints, bad management :

Found them on Ripoff report, MyWot Scam: http://mywot-scam.tumblr.com

I've signed this petition too:
https://www.change.org/petitions/stop-mywot-its-moderators-platinum-users-from-abusing-website-reputations-mywot-must-stop-unqualified-moderators-from-deciding-the-trust-of-a-website

Beware of myWOT Web of Trust Harassment

Watch out for this website. Their name says Web of Trust but it is nothing of the sort. They either willingly turn a blind eye to the abuse their moderators can unlesh on business to ruin their reputation, or they are completely incompotent. Either way stay away from it!

Anna Ariyaza found this review useful

Terrible company right at the core (starting with owner, management and staff)

I find this company to be highly deceptive, unprofessional and mismanaged. It is surprising they are still in business, and even more surprising they are being used for trusting others. They remain anonymous and expect to be used as a trust solution.

I signed the STOP WOT petition, you should too:
https://www.change.org/petitions/stop-mywot-its-moderators-platinum-users-from-abusing-website-reputations-mywot-must-stop-unqualified-moderators-from-deciding-the-trust-of-a-website

BunnyBugs, Adem Yilmas, Anna Ariyaza and Richard Poulin found this review useful

Pas mal

expérience plûtot satisfaisante

Verleumdung und unqualifizierte Bewertungen

Einige wenige Platin-Mitglieder welche dummerweise das 500-fache Stimmrecht haben machen das eigentlich gute System kaputt!
Ausserdem kann man Bewertungen kaufen und sich dadurch aufwerten, oder Mitbewerber abwerten lassen.

Anna Ariyaza and Richard Poulin found this review useful

Very Biased

With the capability of mass ratings, this site is very biased. Someone does not like you and they can rate all your sites bad in one click.

Anna Ariyaza and Richard Poulin found this review useful

Better to be warned one time too many than one too little

In this world you have to be skeptics and freethinker, it's the smartest. I would even warned but not completely stopped from going the way I want.

Companies can be exposed in newspapers unfounded and have destroyed their business. It can also happen here in Trustpilot.

But with WOT you can go a little plains and locking people the way, but it is possible ignrere blockage.

the possibility of just clicking 4 times in the red zone without justification may well be a bad thing

Warning to all Webmasters and SEO Company’s – WOT – (Web of Trust).

Warning to all Webmasters and SEO Company’s – WOT – (Web of Trust).
This Company from Helsinki claims to offer:-
“Would you like to know which websites you can trust?”
What they don’t tell you is anyone, even children, can end up rating a web site. Anyone can play at being GOD to devastate well run legitimate web sites. When you sign up with WOT they encourage you to rate more sites so that you increase your activity score which gives you an increased weighting on your reviewing. We had four well established web sites based in the UK, that where all PCI compliant and each site had its own SSL certificate. Along came a reviewer based in Italy and suddenly all our sites where branded “WARNING THIS SITE HAS A POOR REPUTATION BASED ON USER RATINGS”. To make matters even worse, as one user brands your web site as POOR along comes all his chums and they also click the agree box, so now your are really in a difficult situation.
First we contacted WOT through their web site to say this cannot be correct and can you intervene?, a few days later their reply came:-
“If you have already followed the instructions outlined here then there is nothing else we can do to help”.
We had checked the FAQ section that they were referring to so they had confirmed nothing can be done. They clearly have created something that they refuse to police.

As we tried to find out what could have caused this terrible situation, we discovered through the Forum we could communicate with the reviewer. We asked why did you do this to our web sites?
Below are some of the reasons listed. The reviewer MARCO2981 was ranked as number five in the world of WOT reviews having reviewed over 54,000 web sites. This means that WOT give him a rating score so high that even if we managed to ask 50 customers to take the time to register and rate us correctly their combined rating would be unlikely to change the poor rating we now have.

Trying to stay at number five must means this reviewer cannot spend much time on each site and certainly would not take the time to read correctly the policy and other legal documentation on our sites. A quick condemnation of all our four sites and he was off. Lets wonder for a moment how many well run sites has he attacked and condemned over the years? He probably has no idea how his actions in five minutes can undo years of hard work to a small family run business. As his lust to stay at the top of the league continues he never look’s back or pauses for a second, to contemplate maybe he has got that wrong. MARCO2981. His picture not of himself but a cartoon image of throwing trash into a dustbin! This really does sum it up for us. He must think he is cleaning up the internet, however what is really happening is he is destroying the internet as we know it and as time passes Amazon and Ebay and the likes will become more dominant and there will become fewer and fewer smaller innovative web sites. This will have a knock on effect as many SEO Companies will then find less and less work is available.

We spent the following week actioning all the points that had been raised and duly email back to MARCO2981. We never received a reply or a rerating of our sites.

Below are listed the three issues that were common to all four sites:-

“Your domain is a personal domain and no address is available to see at Nominet (UK .co.uk registers)”
We wrote back saying the default in the UK was to not display your home address with a personal domain, however to try and appease these reviewers we agreed to contact Nominet and have the home address displayed for all to see. (This seems to contravene privacy)

“Your Company registered office was the home address”
The Accountants have now changed this at Company House so the registered office is now also the works Office address.

“Your SSL Certificates does not display any Ownership information.”
We pay £50 a year for each of four Separate SSL certificates and so contacted the provider to ask why ownership information was not shown. We wrote “Hi Support we have received some very negative feedback on our web sites from a "WOT" Web of trust reviewers. They are saying our SSL are not safe I believe because "This website does not supply ownership information."
Is it possible for us to enter ownership details? If so how do we do this?
Kind regards Andrew.

The reply from our SSL provider:-
“Hi,
Thanks for contacting us.
The level of detail depends on the SSL certificate purchased, as this is our SimpleSSL it does not contain much information on the site or owner.
It all comes down to 'cosmetic' preferences and if someone wants to examine the SSL cert details in more detail by viewing the properties of the cert.
i.e. - when you double click the 'padlock' icon on an SSL secured page > View Certificate > Details tab.
Domain authenticated SSL's (Standard SSL) will show and have information specifically about the domain name it is securing, where as the Simple SSL won't.
Then you have Extended Verification SSL which in the details will have both information about the domain but also about your company after extensive checks.
You could say 99% of the time no-one bothers to double click the padlock icon to check for these details and would then know what they're looking for - most people are just happy with a secured page”.

Next we received another comment from one of the WOT reviewers about our TrustWave Icons, you will see from below they are an International specialists in supporting PCI compliance (making sure web sites are safe and secure in all areas)” We had been advised by our International Bank to sign up with them as they are one of the best PCI specialists in the world.

Trustwave Holdings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Trustwave Holdings is a privately owned Information Security company that provides on-demand data security and payment card industry compliance management solutions. The company’s international headquarters is located in Chicago, and regional offices are located in London, São Paulo, and Sydney. Trustwave is currently the only company that is an authorized PCI Forensic Investigator in all geographic regions. On April 21 2011 Trustwave Holdings filed for IPO.

WOT Reviewer
“BTW - I wouldnt waste your money on 'trust seals' from sites such as Trustwave. They are unreliable.”
My Advice to WOT would be let Goggle, Bing and the other search engines determine how good and safe a web site should be as they use many Algorithms and don’t rely on people’s misconceptions to try and make rash decisions on safe ecommerce web sites. Security software is great at offering adequate protection from dangerous sites.
This is the end of my experience with WEB OF TRUST and I thank you for taking the time to read this. Hopefully in time, additional steps will be put in place to protect secure well run sites, however until the day the Company Web of Trust decide to change and take some ownership for their actions, no webmaster is safe! You have been warned.

Anna Ariyaza and Richard Poulin found this review useful

die Bewertungen können leicht manipoliert werden...

Es ist echt schlimm wenn z.b. von einem User etwas positives geschrieben wird und dies dann überwiegend nur negativ bewertet wird. Das kann nicht sein! Das ist unlogisch. Aber mal ehrlich, verkaufe ich eine Dienstleistung, dann bewerte ich diese Positiv, und die Konkurenz negativ, leider ist in vielen Bereichen die Konkurenz stark und man ist machtlos. Wenn ich schlechte arbeit verkaufen würde, dann würde ich es ja verstehen, aber ich habe so viele Stammkunden die mich immer weiter empfehlen und ich habe nur sehr selten unzufriedene Kunden, bei denen ich aber auch sofort nachbessere und mich mit dem Kunden zusammen setzte.

worst review system i have ever seen

you dont even have to verify your email address or be proven as a customer to review here only 2 reasons why this site is so bad there are many more.

Do something about spammed and unfair ratings and maybe it might become better

Mike, ElectroSpares Net and Richard Poulin found this review useful

Complicated website

The purpose of this site is good and the system is quite fair, but is very complicated to use.

Makes browsing and Shopping safer

Of cause its bias. Its based on user ratings and reviews.
But in general its good info and helps people.

If you want malware, phishing, adware filtering tools or advice. There are other helpful tools.

Unfair System. Our legitimate business with 3 years tremendous records turned to untrustworthy within 24 hours !

WOT claims that they are out to protect people from Internet fraud and scams. However, this is only their claim and below is a description of the terrible experience we had with them:-

We run an online business, a legitimate online business doing video production for companies and businesses. Nothing of the sort that will offend anyone nor be categorized as FRAUD or SPAM. We have many returning clients and received similar recognition on the quality of our works on the Internet.

We had WOT installed and we checked it from time to time to ensure everything was going well. Just a week ago, we found out that our site is flagged RED (considered as having low reputation) out of nowhere. One of our staff left a comment on WOT forum and suddenly, we received a comment on our Score Board from one Platinum user claiming that our site had privacy issues, we were Spammers and our website had ethical issues. He provided some links to justify his claims. One link led to a third party website which detects malware, spam or suspicious stuff on websites. Surprisingly, the link that the user provided showed that our site is clean!

We found many similar comments with links posted regarding other websites and much to our horror, most of these sites are legitimate like us!

Just one comment from our staff on the forum (the comment was subsequently hidden by moderator) and out of a sudden, one user dropped a comment on our Score Board and our site was declared as having bad reputation. The worst thing is, our account was banned without any warning.

So we made another account to communicate with the user who left the comment on our Score Board. The user copy pasted the same comment in our Score Board in his reply. We contacted WOT team and the person who replied us through the support form was one of the co-founders, further proving that the company is small and there is no way that they could monitor any suspicious activity going on their website.

Within 24 hours, our Score Board was literally spammed by some users who know nothing about what we do. The only reason that they rated our business badly was because one of our staff posted one comment on their forum. They even added an extra rating on Child Safety on our Score Board and the rating was going lower and lower. We're not running a porn site and we do not even feature anything not suitable for kids on our site! In fact, there are many nice animations on our site which are suitable for children. Imagine a porn site having GOOD reputation on WOT, while a site which produces animation suitable for kids is being flagged RED and deemed not suitable for kids!

WOT team did not even verify whether the claim was based on real proof as long as the user who leaves a comment is a Platinum member and there was no way that they could investigate further into it nor remove the wrong rating.

This is another example of how people can easily do on a site like WOT: http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Anything-Goes/MYWOT-rating.html.

To know that there are millions of WOT users out there is terrifying. What they have done to our site affects our site traffic and our potential clients might not know that the ratings on WOT is biased.

Do not trust WOT!

Benjamin Klapproth, Alfred Trust, Mike and Richard Poulin found this review useful

Wish I could give zero stars

This is a totally unreliable site that gives misleading information about good and legitimate businesses.

Mike and Richard Poulin found this review useful

Very poor rating system supplies inaccurate results

'Web Of Trust' supplies misleading and inaccurate results based on scores from 'trusted sources' which are themselves being manipulated, and refuse to correct these even when challenged with proof. See; http://mywotscam.com/wotscam/
and
http://www.affhelper.com/mywot-reviews-exposed/#comment-189284

Lilith Fry, Benjamin Klapproth, Alfred Trust and Richard Poulin found this review useful

WOT - Godt værktøj

WOT er i samme stil som trustpilot hvor man installere et plug-in i sin browser og så kan man anmelde en side og se om den er ok så snart man kommer ind på siden.
Man kan også se om en side er børnevenlig og meget mere.

Kan varme anbefale WOT sammen med trustpilot, så er man helt sikker.

die Mitglieder und zahlreiche Quellen geben den Sites ihre Wertung,

die Bewertungen sind recht zuverlässig, und im Gegensatz zu anderen Site Reviewern kann man im Forum fragen, ob eine Site sauber bzw. vertrauenswürdig ist. Ebenso kann man sich da äußern, wenn man der Ansicht ist, dass eine Site unfair bewertet wurde.
Sockenpuppen haben bei WOT keine Chancen, da neue User erst ein gewisses Vertrauen im System gewinnen müssen damit ihre Wertung Gewicht hat. Dies ist ein Punkt der die Manipulation verhindert und meiner Meinung nach auch effektiv. Zudem sollte man sich darüber bewusst sein, dass Kommentare nur optional sind und nicht als Bewertung gleichgesetzt werden dürfen.
Ich bin bei Web of Trust schon seit 2008 aktiv und bewerte dort täglich Sites und habe WOT als ein sehr gutes Addon erfahren; die Community macht mywot.com aus.

Lastminuteauskunft.de found this review useful