The prominence of spam, phishing, identity theft and web content credibility controversies has increased people's skepticism about web content. For example, about nine out of ten people have changed their web behavior because of fears of identity theft.

These nuisances pose challenges for all types of sites, whether they are content, retail or service oriented. Because of this, companies should identify ways to promote their credibility, and eliminate aspects of their sites that may cause concern.

Five Ways to Improve Your Site's Credibility

One of the most straightforward set of recommendations available for improving your site's credibility comes from WebWatch, a project of Consumer Reports. The project's goal is to help improve the quality of information published on the World Wide Web.

They outline five guidelines for promoting sites' credibility:

1. Make your identity clear.

Web sites can improve their credibility by making their identify clear. WebWatch recommends disclosing your company's physical location prominently, providing a phone number and providing an email address or other online contact method. Sites should also make it clear who they are owned by, and state their purpose and mission.

While WebWatch doesn't specifically mention this, it's important that your identify is expressed in your website URL, too. Who hasn't received a spam message telling you that you need to update your eBay account, with a link to ebay.somebogusSite.com? Phishing is common enough that it can be a liability to your site's credibility if your URLs are not a clear reflection of your company.

2. Distinguish Advertising and Sponsored Information from Other Content

Sites need to make obvious the difference between advertising and sponsored content and news and information. When this is blurred, such as when sponsored search results are mixed in with "natural" search results, credibility suffers.

3. Disclose Fees and Business Relations with Other Sites

Many people are doing financial transactions online now, and becoming increasingly sophisticated about it. People want to know that they are getting a fair deal, and understand what affects the price that they pay. If this isn't clear, it raises questions.

For example, when you do a search at Travelocity, it defaults to showing results sorted by "Travelocity Picks." It's not obvious from the site whether their picks are the best deals, good deals on relatively nice hotels, or simply hotels that paid a fee to get promoted. If this was immediately clear from the site, people might be more inclined to trust the site's picks.

4. Correct False or Misleading Information

Sites need to quickly correct mistakes and should consider having a page where incorrect information is corrected. Commerce sites should clearly state what a consumer's rights are if they make a purchase based on incorrect information.

5. Privacy

Sites should provide easy-to-find and easy-to-understand privacy policies. The policy should discuss how personal information will be used, and also explain how both personal information and information such as server log data is used.

A good resource for developing privacy policies and practices is the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences page. It provides a standard approach for discussing and stating privacy practices in both user-readable and machine-readable form.

WebWatch's guidelines obviously do not address all the issues that can face a site that wants to promote its credibility. Nevertheless, the 5 guidelines provide a very good starting point for companies to address this complex issue.

If you're interested in finding out more about the issue of Web credibility, a variety of related information is included in the Resources section.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES



The CARS Checklist (Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness, Support)

Consumer Reports WebWatch Credibility Guidelines

Evaluating Web Pages

Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility

Can You be Trusted?

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

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