Is being listed in the McAfee Directory and displaying a McAfee Secure logo on your site worthwhile?

[djlittman]

I am trying to decide whether or not to renew a plan with McAfee Secure.  My initial thought was that displaying the logo was not worth the cost, and that I would be able to establish the same consumer confidence with a seal from Authorize.net.

Does anyone have an opinion on display the McAfee Secure seal and/or being listed in the McAfee directory.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, has your question been answered?

[Highland]

My $0.02 (apologies if I'm soapboxing)

I wasn't terribly impressed with them back when they were Hackersafe. The idea was that they would scan for known vulnerabilities and report them to you. You could then post their banner on your site and claim to be "safe". But I came to realize it was a banner for rubes who don't have any idea about what it represents. In fact, they had me turn OFF some security features so they could scan us properly. They found a few things we could do better but a lot of their security alerts were notifying us a lot about updated packages, not realizing we were running packages with the same security fixes backported (it's a server admin thing).It's not just McAfee tho. I'd say the same about any security banner (i.e. Authorize.net). Most people don't have any idea why it's supposed to be safer, they're just supposed to "feel" safer. They don't stop a site from being hacked, or having its data compromised and these services will tell you, the server admin, that up front.

[TomRayner]

I agree with you that you'd be able to replicate that same level of consumer trust with Auhorize.net.  In fact I'd say that Authorize is one of the leaders in the field regarding this, at least ahead of McAfee, so arguably you would earn more trust from that logo.

In terms of SEO, I can tell you now that you'd be receiving very little, if any at all, benefit from being listed in the McAfee directory, unless you were on like page 1 of the featured merchant section.  If your hesitation in cancelling is hinging on that point, I'd quite categorically say you should cancel.  You just won't be getting a lot of SEO benefit at all there.