Implications for Website Trust and Credibility Assessment

With the expansion of the Internet services provided to users to cover almost all areas that were dominated by traditional face-to-face and location based businesses, one of the major challenges for such expansion is security and its related concerns. Customers or users need to trust the websites they visit in terms of the information or content. This research proposes a new formula for evaluating the credibility (called XD TRank) metric of websites. A case study of 40 selected websites in Jordan is used to assess the proposed credibibility metric. The metrics required to assess Websites and pages credibility are collected and evaluated based on 25 existing metrics and built a model using SPSS by applying stepwise linear regression analysis to predict the XD TRank. Results showed that there is a broad range of metrics that affect the credibility of a website or a webpage and their impact on credibility may vary on their significancy or impact on the trust rank metric. For e-business in particular, trust rank metrics can be used part of quality assurance and auditing processes. Those can be important assets for users to be able to distinguish known, popular and reliable e-commerce websites from spammers or websites which try to trick novice users. Trust rank can be also used like a logo in all Website pages to alert users if they were redirected to phishing pages.