The Scam Detector’s VLDTR® finds puri.sm having a low authoritative rank of 23.4. This means that the business is characterized as Suspicious. Unsafe. Doubtful.
There are a few valid reasons for this 23.4 mark. Most importantly, the domain name is very new. It was registered recently. This makes it very challenging for a brand new site to launch the business, promote the products, get people to buy them, getting clients to try them, and then have time to get the reviews - all in a short time.
Purism appears to be trying to make me not like them, but it’s not a new site. Per a domain lookup with this website, https://findmydomain.org/whois/puri.sm, puri.sm has been registered since 05/05/2014. If Purism is a scam, it’s a phenomenally successful scam. Personally, I think Purism is trying to be a legitimate business but is just utterly failing (probably for multiple reasons).
The domain is seven years old on the Internet. Unless they are using as a standard to define “old” the speed at which a human being grows, I would consider the domain at least: “not new”.
Trying their domain scan against a couple of personal sites as well as sites that have non-common (com/net/org) domain names I find this utility to be garbage. It doesn’t detect https consistently nor properly, it consistently fails to get accurate domain registration dates, fails to scrape plain text data and all around is not doing the things it claims to do.
I’m not taking sides on the purism legitimacy on this one just calling out that this tool is useless.
I’m thinking that it is of limited use. I would completely ignore the percentage rating and instead look only at the individual items reported.
I tried it on one of my own domains, significantly older than puri.sm, and I had the same problem of Domain Creation Date: Not Found which means the domain’s ranking is starting already behind the 8 ball. So I am Suspicious. Unsafe. Doubtful. too.
I suspect that they are grabbing whois info and looking at the Creation Date: field.
I think the problem here is that if the domain has been moved from one registrar to another, the creation date is not available. I looked at others of my domains where the registrar has not changed and the Creation Date was present.
It actually makes sense to look at creation date - a genuinely dodgy web site created ‘yesterday’ purely for the purpose of exploiting the latest vulnerability should get a low ranking on that attribute - but they are seemingly not handling the situation that the date is not available - and it is doubtful that any domain operator could get the registrar to fix that once the registrar has changed.
Obviously most of us are going to score poorly on the popularity (e.g. Alexa) rating.
The (lack of) metadata elements is valid feedback although I don’t know that you can infer anything about a web site’s reputation from that. I mean if a web site is a scam, it can easily contain deliberately false metadata elements.
I tried a different domain and “scam detector” said that the domain is “not registered”, despite the fact that the domain is registered and there is a working web site for the domain. So apparently there must be other unknown deficiencies in “scam detector”. (I think I know what the problem is and, yes, I should fix this one day but … care factor too low for now.)
I like how they conflate a web site’s properties with a business reputation. See the descripion, they use “business”, but the properties mentioned are chiefly about websites. As if web sites could scam people without an entity behind them (okay, smart contracts nonwithstanding). This also completely misclassifies established businesses that decided to go online yesterday, say, due to lockdowns.
And that’s even assuming that the web site works as advertised.
Another option is that a business started with their sole online presence being in social media, or with their web site being a freebie web site through their ISP (i.e. in the ISP’s domain or subdomain thereof), and then graduated to having their own actual web site.
I think they should remove all reference to “business” and refer only to “web site”.
Except much of the individual items I’ve reviewed that they report are inaccurate. I agree with the concept of some of the categories being potentially interesting, but beyond that the, useless.
I don’t see how this can be both valid and simultaneously unable to infer anything from it. If there’s nothing to infer then the feedback is meaningless. Also I have sites with Metadata that this tool just fails to read but search engines, etc, parse just fine…
I stand by my assessment that at this time their website scanning tool is useless due to consistently not gathering the information it purports to gather.
I can see how my comment could be confusing. However you touched on what I meant: Lack of metadata can impact on how search engines deal with your web site, so you should care if it is pointing out to you that you have no metadata, and it is helpful for it to point it out, but you can’t infer anything about reputation, because it is trivial to ‘forge’ metadata.
I think we are generally in agreement. I won’t be using their scanning tool in the future and they have a fair amount of work ahead of them to fix bugs if they want it to be useful.
(You can see that on one of my domains it just said “not registered”. It was about then that I gave up on it.)
I can see how my comment could be confusing. However you touched on what I meant: Lack of metadata can impact on how search engines deal with your web site, so you should care if it is pointing out to you that you have no metadata, and it is helpful for it to point it out, but you can’t infer anything about reputation, because it is trivial to ‘forge’ metadata.
