Imagine being the most annoying guy in the neighborhood. You are always trying to sell something to your neighbors and coming to their houses (uninvited, of course). One day, they decide to lock their doors and not let you in. All of them.
The same can happen to your IP address or your domain. In other words, it gets blacklisted.
In this post, we’ll walk you through what it means to be blacklisted, how to check if your domain’s been blacklisted, and what you need to do to get off the blacklist.
What is a Blacklist?
Did you know that approximately 122.3 billion spam emails are being sent daily? Sent, not delivered.
To protect us from actually receiving billions of these emails, there are bases (lists) with domains and IP addresses that have been flagged as sources of harmful content. They are called Blacklists.
If your domain or an IP address is on one of those lists, email providers will prevent your recipients from getting your email.
Besides emails, browsers can also block people from getting to your website.
Some of the most popular blacklists are:
- Google Transparency Report
- Spamhaus
- Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL)
- PhishTank
How to Check if Your Domain or IP Address was Blacklisted?
If there’s anything worse than being blacklisted, it’s certainly not knowing that you are blacklisted.
You might be splurging your marketing budget without knowing that your emails are not being delivered, or that your customers can’t visit your website.
If you have purchased an email list and have been sending a lot of unwanted emails, you can (almost) be sure that if your domain is not already blacklisted, it will be sooner or later.
However, it’s not always that simple, and to be honest, sometimes it’s not even your fault.
To check whether you are blacklisted or not, you can simply copy your IP address or your domain in this tool, or visit a Google Transparency Report page and enter your URL.
You’ll get results that look like this:
You’ll also be able to see the possible reasons for being on a particular blacklist.
How Can you Remove your Domain or IP Address from a Blacklist?
If you’ve found yourself listed on some of these blacklists – don’t panic.
We know it might sound terrifying knowing that your brand has been marked as harmful, or not safe, but there’s a way to get yourself off the list.
If your IP address has been blacklisted, you can contact your hosting provider, and they’ll help you get a new IP address. What’s more, even your hosting provider can help you get off the blacklist.
Another option is to contact the blacklist owner and ask for removal. Most of the time, they will walk you through a few steps and advise you to fix the problems that got you on the list in the first place. Finally, they will remove your domain or your IP address from their list.
Bear in mind that even though it might be a piece of cake to remove yourself from the blacklist for the first time, they are not so gentle with repeat offenders.
With that in mind, let’s answer the question…
What Causes Brands to be Blacklisted?
As mentioned before, there are 100+ billion spam emails sent daily. Most of the domains that got blacklisted have either received a lot of spam complaints or have hit a spam trap.
What is an Acceptable Spam Complaint Rate?
The normal spam complaint rate is around 0.1%. Everything above that is considered a high rate. That means if you receive 2 spam complaints out of 1000 emails sent, you might end up blacklisted.
There are multiple reasons why people would mark your email as spam, but in most cases – the unsubscribe button is not visible enough.
People like having an option, and if those who decided to unsubscribe can’t see the button immediately, they will report it as spam.
What are Spam Traps?
Inbox providers (e.g. Gmail) use a very clever way to detect those who are buying email addresses or scraping them from the internet.
They create specific email addresses (that look just like the normal ones) and post them online in places where only email scraping apps will find them.
By collecting and emailing them, inbox providers know exactly who these spammers are.
How to Prevent Your Domain or IP Address from being Blacklisted?
When it comes to keeping your brand off the blacklist and avoid being marked as spam, there are more don’ts than dos.
Here are the most important ones:
- Don’t link to disreputable websites. Links are probably the most crucial part of your content. As the name suggests, when you are linking your content to websites with a poor reputation, you link your brand to their reputation. If you’re not sure whether a website publishes safe content or not, make sure that you check their URL using the Google Transparency Report.
- Never buy an email list – Just like we mentioned before, besides having the risk of recipients marking you as spam, you might easily fall into a spam trap.
- Don’t use link shorteners in your emails – This technique has been used by spammers to mask suspicious URLs. As a result, even if you shorten the most reputable link (like Wikipedia), it will be considered spam.
- Remove inactive subscribers. – Cleaning up your list once or twice a year will improve your deliverability and open rates, ensuring that your brand is considered reputable.
- Be mindful of your content. You may want to take a look at your content and make sure you are following the best practices for avoiding spam. Here’s what you shouldn’t be doing:
- Have too many images
- Write in ALL CAPS
- Mention (too many times) money, currencies, or currency symbols ($)
- Use spammy words (mostly related to health, pharmaceutical products, etc.)
- Not leave an option for unsubscribing.
Emails can be a lifeline of your business, so you certainly don’t want to have your lifeline suddenly cut off. We hope that this article’s helped you learn about the best practices, as well as how to stay off the email blacklist.
We would appreciate it if you could help us spread the word by sharing this article with your friends. In the meantime, if you have any other questions, we will be more than happy to answer.
Till next time!
Great content! Keep up the good work!