5. No Website Information

As discussed in Section 2.5.3, we expect most websites to have some information about who is responsible for the website, as well as some contact information. For websites with YMYL pages, such as online banks, we expect to find a lot of information about the site, including extensive customer service information.

Think about the purpose of the website and the type of website information users would expect or demand.

YMYL pages with absolutely no website information, or other pages where the available information is completely inadequate for the purpose of the website (for example, an online bank with only an email address), should be rated

Lowest.

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6. Highly Untrustworthy, Unreliable, Unauthoritative, Inaccurate, or Misleading

Sometimes, pages just don’t “feel” trustworthy. Use the Lowest rating for any of the following:

• Pages or websites which you strongly suspect are scams (see these links for more information about Internet scams: Avoid Scams 1, Avoid Scams 2, Internet Fraud).

• Pages which ask for personal information without a legitimate reason (for example, pages which ask for name, birthdate, address, bank account, government ID number, etc.).

• Websites which “phish” for passwords to Facebook, Gmail, or other popular online services. See here for information about “phishing” fraud.

• Pages with suspicious download links, which may be malware.

If you suspect a link is malicious, please do not click on it. You do not need to personally experience a malicious download in order to confirm that a website is harmful. Likewise, if you feel strongly a website is a scam, you do not need to engage with it to get proof.

Pages which appear highly untrustworthy should be rated Lowest, even if you’re not able to completely confirm their lack of trustworthiness. Please exercise caution and practice good Internet safety skills.

7. Abandoned Websites or Spammed Pages on a Website

Some websites are not maintained or cared for at all by their webmaster. These “abandoned” websites, especially websites which have become hacked or defaced, should be rated Lowest.

A hacked or defaced website is a site which has been modified without permission from the website owner(s). Responsible webmasters should regularly check their websites for suspicious behavior and take steps to protect their users. Note: You will very rarely see hacked or defaced websites because most webmasters act very quickly to undo the damage to their website.

However, you may encounter pages with a large amount of spammed forum discussions or spammed user comments. We’ll consider a comment or forum discussion to be “spammed” if someone posts unrelated comments which are not intended to help other users, but rather to advertise a product or create a link to a website. Frequently these comments are posted by a “bot” rather than a real person. Spammed comments are easy to recognize. They may include Ads, download, or other links, or sometimes just short strings of text unrelated to the topic, such as “Good,” “Hello,” “I’m new here,” “How are you today,” etc. Webmasters should find and remove this content because it is a bad user experience.

While a specific page on a website may have a large amount of spammed forum discussions or spammed user comments, it does not mean that the entire website contains only spam.

Pages on websites which are not maintained or cared for at all should be rated Lowest. Pages with a large amount of distracting, unhelpful spammed user comments should be rated Lowest.