The question is, as in security, trustworthiness. Trust and/but/then Verify you say? If I have to verify, what's the point of trusting, might as well read amazon reviews and do my own research via google, fb, twitter etc. For a completely new user, a site that even 'smells' of shenanigans is hard to trust. First impressions and all that. If a site invites guest writers, who then shill for their own site, in the main copy of their post, rather than, say, the footnote or sub-title, it starts smelling fishy pretty fast.