Scorecard
The scorecard contains everything you need to know about a website, domain name, or IP.
Scorecard colors
To help bridge across language barriers, colors are used for immediate identification of the overall trustworthiness (safety) of a website. The color range is:
| Reputation | Color and symbol | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent |  = dark green
|
This site has a good reputation and the community considers it a safe and pleasant experience. |
| Good |  = light green
| |
| Unsatisfactory |  = yellow
|
Cautionary advisory, unsatisfactory or mixed ratings. |
| Poor |  = orange
|
This site has a poor reputation and the add-on will bring up the warning screen, or blocking screen, when settings are at their default values. If you choose to proceed, do so with a high amount of care and concern; you have been warned. |
| Very poor |  = red
| |
| Unrated |  = grey
|
There are not enough ratings to compute a reputation for this website, as referenced by the example scorecard provided |
Scorecard components
The scorecard consists of several components that dynamically retrieves the information presented to you. A quick list of these components are as follows:
- Thumbnail
- Help view
- Site name
- Popularity
- Rank
- Owner
- Server location
- Statistics
- Wiki
- Description
- Tags
- Reputation rating
- Trustworthiness
- Vendor reliability
- Privacy
- Child safety
- Comments by category
- Comment: Add / Request
- Comment: listing
Thumbnail
The thumbnail is a captured image of the index page of a website. The purpose is to help visually identify the site in revue. The image may be clear or it may be blurred depending upon the rating level of the Child Safety indicator. When there are poor to very poor ratings for child safety, the image is blurred to prevent viewing of possible pornographic material. The provided image displays both clear and blurred areas for example. This image is updated every 60 days. If you've changed your site design and notice a conflict, don't worry WOT will catch up in due time.
Help view
Clicking on Help View, located at the upper right corner of the Scorecard, brings up an image offering some explanation to various areas of interest such as:
- Popularity
- Server location
- Compete.com statistics
- Description
- Tags
The help view also offers hints to reputation ratings as well as mentioning about the confidence indicators.
Site name
Self-explanatory, the Site Name is the domain name or IP address of the website being rated. This also includes sub domains, for example: subdomain.examle.com.
The Scorecard URL generally incorporates the site name, but in certain cases it does not.
Twitter profiles may be rated in WOT and are given special names for URLs, while the site name remains for scorecard display. For example: twitter.com/Web_of_Trust scorecard's URL is:
http://www.mywot.com/scorecard/_p_k5swex3pmzpvi4tvon2a.twitter.com
Popularity
Popularity is often confused with a site's overal monthly hit rate.
This is not so, the popularity icons, the "little people" that are displayed next to the Site Name are an indication of how many WOT users have visited the website.
Rank
A scorecard ranking is measured by the popularity of a website as visited by WOT users.
Many sites will have an N/A (not applicable) as their rank, if your site may fall into this ranking, don't worry about it, you're part of the majority. This is merely a demographic display and an entertaining one as well. You can view the top ten highest ranked websites by visiting the Community page or to see more, simply open up an empty scorecard URL: http://www.mywot.com/scorecard The ranking of websites is updated every 60 days. As of this writing, Google.com is ranked at number one.
Owner
The owner information is provided with a whois (wikipedia) courtesy link. Currently, the service of choice is with whois.domaintools.com
Server location
For easy visual reference, mini country flags are displayed along with the two letter country code to give you an idea of the location of the web server that the website is hosted on. The example image shows mywot.com which is hosted in Finland and google.com which is hosted in the United States.
Statistics
Website statistical information such as monthly visitors and graphs are provided by compete.com free of charge. There is much information available by this company however, registration is required to access it.
Wiki
The wiki links to aboutus.org that dynamically creates pages for websites from publicly accessible information such as meta tags and whois information. Once built, the pages – like any wiki – are available to be edited by the site owner, it's representatives, or anyone who visits the site.
Description
The scorecard obtains the website's description dynamically through the information supplied by the meta tag from within the site's index page. In the event that no description meta tag exists, nothing is displayed. This information is updated every 60 days.
An example of a description meta tag:
<meta name="description" content="WOT is a Free Internet Security addon for Firefox and IE that warns you about online scams and risky websites that try to deliver malware or send spam." />
Tags
Just like Description, tags are dynamically retrieved information through the value supplied to the meta tag keywords. This information is also updated every 60 days.
An example of a keyword meta tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="spam, online scams, malware, ie addon, firefox addon, online security, free internet security, web of trust, mywot, wot" />
Reputation rating
Herein lies the heart of WOT where website reputations are entered and deemed safe or trusted, cautionary, unsafe or not trustful. The entries made in this section should be done so in an unbiased way, offering genuinely honest ratings. Those who try to abuse the rating system eventually get "caught" because their selected ratings differ from the majority; remember WOT is a meritocracy.
