How To Check Domain Reputation

How To Get Your Domain Name Off Of The Blocklist

Fixing your domain reputation starts with ensuring that its not on the blocklist, but if it is, then you can take the following steps to get it unblocked:

• Step 1: Contact the web host or internet service provider and ask them the reason for adding your domain name to the list.
• Step 2: Give them clarification about the actual scenario. For example, how do you know a phisher or spammer is misusing your website?
• Step 3: Describe the time period of when the issues began.
• Step 4: Let them know about any actions you took to resolve the issue.

Sending a removal request helps regain your email domain reputation, ensuring that none of the emails you send bounce back or land in the spam folder.

Why Has My Email Reputation Gone Down

If your email reputation falls, It might be due to one of these reasons:

• Your readers report your content as spam
• A high hard bounce rate, which can occur when an email cannot be delivered to an address permanently.
• Sending emails to spam traps, which can happen in cases of poor data hygiene or acquisition sources

If your emails are being reported as spam or hard bouncing, it could be related to one of these reasons:

What Is Domain Reputation

Your domain reputation is like a credit score for your sending email domain. Email service providers calculate your domain reputation on a scale of 0 to 100. The closer to 100 your domain score is, the more receiving email servers will trust your emails.

However, domain reputation isnât the only email reputation that mailbox providers consider. They also assign a reputation to your sending IP address.

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What Impacts The Sender Reputation

Here are some of the key things that can make a difference:

• Spam complaints the number of recipients that hit Report as Spam on previous emails. The more frequent such behavior is, the worse your spam reputation will be
• Spam traps these are accounts set up by Internet Service Providers that look just like any other email account. However, sending an email to one is likely to get you on one of the publicly available blacklists
• Soft and hard bounces the first indicates temporary delivery problems, the other usually occurs when an account youre emailing doesnt exist . Read more about soft and hard bounces in another article.
• Sending history this broad term covers things like volume and frequency of your emails. More about what kind of history spam filters like below.
• Engagement this factor also focuses on your past performance and takes into consideration the frequency with which your readers open your emails, reply to them and click on the links.
• Unsubscribes the rate with which your readers have unsubscribed in the past. Be aware that your own employees could be unsubscribing from your emails, hurting your reputation.

As you can see, the list goes on and on. Ultimately, it all comes down to how your previous emails performed.

If a lot of people opted out or didnt care to even open your emails, your reputation will be low.

If you, however, have a healthy, engaged list that you grew organically, your odds of having the next email delivered are high.

How Is Domain Rank Calculated

Ahrefs calculates Domain Grade using the following metrics:

• The number of unique domains with at least one dofollow link, pointing to your website.
• The values of those domains .
• The total number of unique outgoing links each of those websites has.

After getting these three metrics, Ahrefs will then apply some mathematics and coding magic to calculate raw scores, after which they’ll plot these scores on a 1100 scale.

Understanding this calculation method helps you know how you can improve your Domain Rating. But here’s what you also need to understand about improving your score per the calculations:

• Only dofollow links improve Domain Grade. Thus, if the website is only linking to you via nofollow links, it wont increase your Url Reputation.
• The more unique websites a site links to, the less points it will transfer to each of those sites.
• The second, third and subsequent links from the same website will not improve your site’s score.
• If the linking website gets more backlinks and their rating increases, that will positively affect the Dns Rating of each website they link to .

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How To Share Google Postmaster Data

At ActiveCampaign, we use Google Postmaster Tools to help troubleshoot deliverability issues for our customers. If you experience a deliverability issue, we may ask you to share your Google Postmaster data with us. Doing so will help us expedite the troubleshooting process.

To share your Google Postmaster Report:

What Is Domain Reputation Who Checks It And Why

Internet service providers , mailbox providers, and email service providers are all interested in preventing spam and other types of malicious messages from reaching consumers. So, they employ defensive strategies, including determining your reputation, to keep those emails off their systems and out of their users inboxes.

84% of global email traffic is spam, according to recent data.

This map of top email senders illustrates the breadth of ISPs spam problem.

Domain reputation is an assessment of an organizations emailing behavior that attaches at the domain level .

An email senders reputation and IP reputation were almost synonymous in the past. Now, your brand is your bond, and domain reputation represents your sender reputation.

What caused the shift?

Once upon a time, ISPs hoped to stem email spam by rating and blocking the IPs of spammers. They used sophisticated algorithms to monitor and assess the email behaviors linked to each IP and take action against bad actors.

Unfortunately, email spammers quickly learned that they could leave their pasts behind by switching to a new IP. Thats one of the reasons you should warm up a new IP before using it for bulk sending. ISPs treat new IPs with suspicion.

Its a lot harder to change your entire domain each time you get caught spamming consumers.

Thats why providers now weigh domain reputations more heavily when assessing senders intentions.

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Does Domain Reputation Affect Email Deliverability

Absolutely. Domain reputation is used by all major mail service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, AOL, and many more to identify SPAM and abusive senders. If you are unsure if your email domain reputation is contributing to poor email deliverability, please use our free email SPAM check to identify possible issues. We also recommend checking your domain health with the lookup tool above. Cleaning email lists every 6-12 months, especially for older subscribers can greatly improve domain reputation.

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Proactively Monitor Your Reputation

With Mailguns Managed Services, your dedicated technical account manager will do the hard part for you and help you manage your mail server. When it comes to email reputation checks, the outcome is too crucial to rely on anything other than an expert. After all, your domain and IP reputation score plays a big role in determining your deliverability.

Partner with Mailguns Managed Service to support your email growth goals, keep tabs on your domain reputation, and reduce the risk of spam complaints. Get access to a real-time database full of actionable information about your email marketing performance. Our scalable plans grow with your business needs, so well be there the entire way.

Monitoring Your Domain Reputation

Domain reputation is vital for any organization that relies on email to communicate with customers or partners. A bad reputation can lead to deliverability problems, and a good reputation can help improve deliverability.

Weve already talked about the steps to monitor domain reputation and maintain good scores, but heres a quick recap:

• Use a domain reputation checker to determine your standing
• Keep an eye out for your sender score
• Follow the bounce rate
• Keep good SEO practices

Domain reputation builds over time and needs constant monitoring. Now that youre familiar with the process, lets learn about how to improve domain reputation.

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Find Out If You Are Listed On Any Of The Major Blocklists

Blocklists are the last place you want to find your domain name mentioned.

If one or more of the IPs you use pops up on a widely-referenced list like Spamhaus, BarracudaCentral, your deliverability will drop fast. Even appearing on a less popular list can lead to trouble for your brand and signals that a problem is brewing.

Which lists should you check? Blocklist aggregators like the ones Ive listed below will help you keep an eye on your status without having to check every list manually:

• The Anti-Abuse Project

Ways To Check Your Sending Reputation

We always stress the importance of a strong sending reputation. Your sending reputation, or how mailbox providers judge your mail, is driven by how your subscribers are reacting to your messages. If the messages you send generate a lot of spam complaints, your sending reputation will worsen and future messages will be harder to get to the inbox.

On the other hand, if recipients are engaged with your messages, your sending reputation will be stronger and your messages will be more likely to make it to the inbox. Unfortunately, there is no single value or score that describes your sending reputation across all mailbox providers. However, there are a few tools, stats, and tips you can use to monitor and better understand your sending reputation.

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Using Google Postmaster Tools To Improve Your Email Deliverability

Using Google Postmaster tools helps senders better understand their email efforts with high-level reporting on important metrics. Whether youre looking for how to check your domain reputation or trying keep an eye on your encryption and authentication, Google Postmaster Tools help all high-volume senders get more insight into their email. Its even free.

The best part? We track this information for you directly within your SocketLabs dashboard, as part of our proprietary StreamScore. Learn more about how StreamScore can improve your email performance or reach out to us directly so we can show you the best ways to utilize your score. Lets Talk Email.

Checking The Domain Reputation

Each email service provider determines its reputation for your email domain when determining your domains reputation. Gmail thus has a single domain reputation. Yahoo uses a distinct reputation score! There is one for Microsoft Mail. The list keeps on.

This is because email service providers can only gauge the reputation of a domain based on the emails they get from it. The emails sent to other inbox providers are hidden from email service providers.

The tool will compile reputation scores from the various email providers when conducting a domain reputation lookup to offer an average score.

For example, can help you assess your domain reputation.

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Keep Your Send Volumes Low

You have to send more than 100 emails a day for email servers to even notice that youâre sending emails. So you need to stay above that 100 emails per day threshold to have an effect on your sender reputation.

But donât go full bore on your email sends. If most of your emails are going to the spam folder, you could be doing more harm than good by sending a lot of emails.

The goal of sending fewer emails is to cherry-pick who you send emails to. This helps minimize negative signals to email service providers. That way you can slowly ratchet up your sender reputation by getting positive subscriber responses.

Thatâs it. Recovering from email deliverability mistakes and repairing your domain reputation can be challenging. But itâs possible to rebuild your good reputation.

However, even if your domain reputation is good, follow these best practices to ensure that you donât mistakenly cause damage to your domain reputation and protect your email deliverability rate.

â¦Because better email deliverability means more profit from every email you send.

How To Check Domain Reputation

The thing about your domain reputation is that each email service provider calculates their own reputation for your email domain. So, Gmail has one domain reputation. Yahoo! has a different reputation score. Microsoft mail has their own. And the list goes on.

The reason for this is because email service providers can only measure your domain reputation based on the emails they get from your domain. Email service providers canât see the emails you send to other inbox providers.

So, when you run a domain reputation lookup, the tool will collect reputation scores from the various email providers and show you a sort of average score. Itâs very useful information. But itâs possible that your domain reputation could be very good with most email providers, and very bad with one or two inbox providers. But more on that later on.

Here are some tools you can use to check your domain reputation.

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Identify Risky Email Automations And Turn Those Off

Campaigns such as win-back email campaigns are risky. After all, they are reaching out to an already disinterested audience. The chances of them opening your emails and engaging with your content are low.

Email automations your subscribers and customers might not engage with include:

• Cart abandonment emails
• Re-engagement campaigns

Even though these email flows can sometimes work to revive disengaged customers and subscribers, they have a higher likelihood of going unopened and not clicked on than transactional or other promotional emails. If these campaign emails do not lead to engagement, it will further harm your email reputation. Turn these campaigns off to improve your engagement rates.

When Should I Fix My Email Reputation

If you sense deliverability issues and your email reputation has gone down, fixing it should be a top priority. If you dont act quickly, you may start to see less than stellar performance from your email marketing efforts and your reputation will fall further. Every subsequent email you send will be scrutinized even more by ISPs, and they might end up flagging even hyper-relevant emails as spam because your organization has been deemed problematic.

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Getting Access To Google Postmaster Tools

The process of using Google Postmaster Tools all starts with having a Google account and validating your ownership of sending domain. The first step is to visit the website for Google Postmaster Tools and sign-in to your Google Account.

Once signed-in, if you havent verified ownership of any domains previously, youll be asked to add your first domain.

If you already have a domain verified, you can add additional domains using the red plus icon in the lower right-hand corner of the page.

Once youve entered your first domain, Google will provide you with the unique DNS record that you will need to create to verify ownership. The primary verification method that Google presents is a DNS TXT record. They also indicate a secondary verification method of CNAME record. Due to the general bloat of DNS TXT records, SocketLabs recommends that everyone uses the DNS CNAME verification method.

It may take some time before Google can verify the DNS record. Youll see the domain in your management list, but access to the data is not provided until the DNS records are verified.

You see the domain status flip to Verified once the DNS records have been properly published.

It is critical that you DO NOT delete the DNS record once it is verified. Google will re-verify the DNS record exists every month. If verification fails, access to the data for the domain is removed from the Google account.