1. Is there a parent website? Who pays for the website?
2. What does .org or .com have to do with it? Domains do not determine reliability. Not all .org websites are 501C3 nonprofit organizations. Many reliable resources use .com domains like the five US major dailies; NYT, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, and Washington Post.
3. Is the About page really the spin page? How do your corroborate what you read on the About page? Lateral reading is a way to use the entire Web as a web to evaluate the credibility of a website.
4. Even if a link on a website leads to a reliable resource, be sure to read the content in order to see if it supports the premise of the website or not.
5. Don't judge a website by its cover! A website may look professional; yet it is easy to manufacture respectability, so browse laterally!
6. Check Wikipedia, especially the entry's references for your topic. Note the Wikipedia "Talk" webpage for entries. This is where experts refute the content.
These website evaluation tips are from this 2020 report:
Wineburg, Sam, Breakstone, Joel, Ziv, Nadav, and Smith, Mark. (October 21, 2020). Educating for Misunderstanding. Stanford History Education Group. Retrieved from https://cor.stanford.edu/research/educating-for-misunderstanding/
Use the Drama Method and Lateral Reading to evaluate potential research sources:
DRAMA stands for Date, Relevance, Accuracy, Motivation and Authority
Date – When was this material published?
Relevance – Is it relevant to your research?
Accuracy – Is the information presented accurate? A quick lateral reading can tell you if a source is accurate in its representation or not.
Motivation – Why did someone spend time to create this source?
Authority - Who created this material? What is their expertise on the topic? Remember: Anyone can make a webpage or write a blog. Doing a quick search on an author or even the publisher gives a much greater idea if someone should be talking about a topic as if they know all about it, and that allows you to judge credibility.
What is Lateral Reading?
It's a technique to evaluate a source by reading about it on other, trustworthy sites.