Trust rating is a grossly unconsidered factor for your website’s ranking as well as the chance that it will end up caught by a potential visitor’s anti-virus software.

You may not even be aware of what influences your trust rating… Well here are a few things….

Having a decent SSL certificate and HTTPS status. If you don’t have a proper SSL certificate installed on your site you won’t have the Locked Padlock in the search / address bar. This is important to keep in mind if your site is going to be accepting payments from anyone as it tells the visitor’s browser that the site is encrypted. Without encryption your payment information can be read by the site owner which isn’t good.

Not having your email wind up in recipient’s junk mail. Some poorly designed plugins will send emails from your website to your recipients. There is a lot of room for you to design an email that will for some reason (which you’ll probably be unconscious of) set off the recipient’s spam filter and put the email in Junk. Sin of sins. Well it gets worse. Email clients that see you are sending many emails that are going straight to junk associate the sender as a source of spam, a label that you don’t want further increasing your chances of ending up in junk or on an email domain blacklist much like ours. This can be avoided by passing your emails through an SMTP service. Don’t think we’re providing the tools to spam though, SMTP service providers will block actual spam and blacklist the IP address sending it.

Keeping your site safe. You may think that keeping a good online reputation and trust rating all has to do with what YOU do with your site. But it’s also about how you protect yourself. If you allow hackers, or malicious users in they tend to have a purpose, be it placing lots of ads on your site to make money for themselves or something more malicious like stealing your visitors information. Either way utilizing Two Factor Authentication and limiting visitors access on the back-end of the site can help you to avoid these unwanted intrusions and help to keep your website in high regard.