For the 2012 Honor Roll, OTA reviewed more than 1,200 sites using 10 criteria. Companies had to earn composite scores of 80 percent or higher across the 10 individual factors to earn the Honor Roll designation.

The factors included the following:

Nearly 30 percent of the sites reviewed earned the Honor Roll designation, with social media sites making the biggest gains: 52 percent of social media sites made the Honor Roll in 2012, compared with only 12 percent in 2011. Members of the social media Honor Roll include a who's who of social media sites, including Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter and Zynga.

Spiezel believes social media sites have made big gains because their infrastructure tends to be newer and thus they sidestep much of the complexity that sites using older, legacy infrastructure have to deal with. He adds that these sites have recognized that countering online abuse and fraud is essential to their business.

"Twitter and so many other social sites, to their credit, have adopted best practices," he says. "They recognize that their infrastructure is not nearly as complex as some of the older sites or businesses that have been around, and they take advantage of that."