The free Silktide Sitescore is one of those tools that every webmaster should know about and use. However, you should also take it’s results with a grain of salt. As with many tools like this, there is a way to manipulate your results in your favor, if you know the tricks. Nevertheless, for legitimate uses, it is an invaluable resource that will help you raise the bar on the overall quality of your website.
One feature of the Silktide Sitescore tool that I, personally, have a bitter sweet opinion of is the “Visitor rating” feature. If it were used the way it was intended by visitors, it would be a fantastic addition that provided somewhat useful feedback to webmasters as to the overal look of their site. In its current form, the “Visitor rating” feature offers very little useful feedback and is quite often abused. Silktide has attempted to offset some of the abuse by adjusting the scores to compensate for spammers, but this still has it’s flaws.
I would like to see Silktide enhance the “Visitor rating” feature by requiring email validation with comments. This would help strengthen the integrity of the results,...