Is toptenreviews.com Safe?

Mostly useless paid review site. They've been around for years (and have cleaned up the site considerably I might add since I first saw it) but their reviews are always coloured by their advertisers. The fact that ad space and "buy now" links are given more screen time should be a pretty big warning. When I wrote them once to ask how to get a review (in 2007 before I knew what they were really like) they sent me a price list.

Reviews seem biased. There were several glaring pieces of missinformation. e.g. They claim Safari doesn't have a privite browsing mode yet, the wikipedia page for Safari CLEARLY states it does and furthermore if you click through it shows "The earliest reference to the term was in May 2005 and used to discuss the privacy features in the Safari browser bundled with Mac OS X Tiger.[1]". Another example in "Web Analytics Review" Google Analytics isn't even in the top10 review. It just smells fishy more than simple mistake...

Today, one of the subdomains 'blu-ray-to-dvd-converter-software-review' has a download/sales link to 'Leawo blu ray ripper' for $35, a Chinese hacked user interface version of the free trialware 'MakeMKV' transcoding software. The original author has published this information on the original site and claims that this hacked version from Leawo will stop working once the 45 day trial period expires, with no way to purchase the real license. Pure scam.

All reviews indicate that the best of 2011 have already been tested. I found an instance where a 2008 version of a program was reviewed against the 2010 version of a competitor. The 2010 was ranked #1 and the 2008 #3 - but you can buy the 2009/2010 version on the site's e-commerce page.

Their reviews promote for the provider who pays for their advertises of products. Don't believe on the reviews in this site.All reviews on this site are influenced by money/association ID referrals. This is the some way people earn money. If you carefully scrutinize the "Buy now" links on the top 5 rated products, you'll see that they all have an Affiliate ID.Which means the author is getting like 20% commission for each transaction realize via this link. The author send 15 emails to 15 AV companies, asking them to become an affiliate partner. Some of them respond, some don't. Then he stitches up a website with more or less junk info.

The results promoted on this site, are basically designed to make money for the site owner- not give you the chance to make an informed decision. The "results" are based on how much commission a company being "reviewed" will pay for people who buy a license via this site, and this whole site is basically an affiliate link pot disguised as "real" reviews....some of the reviews are horrendously out of date and inaccurate, and I would suggest looking for a more credible source of information.