Tuesday, March 26, 2024

How To Check Your Domain Reputation

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Domain Reputation Lookup Lets You Check:

Manage your domain reputation
  • If a domain or IP address should be treated with caution based on a citation on one or more malware data feeds.

  • If the domains most recent WHOIS record is redacted and/or registered in an offshore country.

  • If the domains Secure Sockets Layer certificate has been recently obtained.

  • If the domain or IP address has exploitable SSL vulnerabilities.

How To Monitor Your Domain Reputation With Google Postmaster

Google Postmaster Tools is a tool developed and provided by Google to monitor different KPIs relating to email deliverability on Gmail addresses. The tools are useful to bulk senders, transactional emails, marketing, newsletters, for example, to get an idea of KPIs relating to deliverability on mailboxes hosted by Google . The metrics available on Google Postmaster are spam landing rate, IP address reputation, domain reputation, feedback loop, authentification, encryption, and delivery errors.

In this article, we will detail how to monitor your domain reputation on GPT and how to optimize it.

So How Can You Tell If Your Emails Are Actually Being Delivered

You’re probably wondering now, are MY emails going to spam?

Unfortunately, knowing if your companies emails are going to spam is more complicated than looking at the delivery rate in your marketing automation platform. An email can be successfully delivered to spam.

Theres a big difference between the delivery rate report in most email marketing programs and email deliverability. The delivery rate essentially is the number of emails that made it to the digital post office. Ive seen many brands that have reported email delivery rates of 99%+ but still see their welcome emails to new subscribers going to spam.

So how can you tell if your domain reputation is causing emails to end up in spam?

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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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How Is Domain Reputation Calculated #

Email Verification: spam stories, part 2

To determine domain reputation, receivers keep track of ways your domain is used in a message and how that message ends up performing in the inbox. Based on this data, major ISPs use complex algorithms to ultimately score your domain, checking that score when scanning future messages to establish a level of trust. The better your domain reputation check at a particular receiver, the less likely your future messages will end up rejected or in a spam folder.

So that means you, as a sender, dont have just one big domain reputation floating out there in cyberspace. Instead, a domain has countless reputations unique to the proprietary scoring processes a specific receiver employs. Plus youre probably not sending the exact content and volume of messages to every single receiver. For example, its expected that Gmails seen at least slightly different engagement from their users than Yahoo.

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Keep Your Recipients Interested

The success of your business is dependent on your customers, make it the goal of your email program to maintain their interest.

Unlike social media followers, you own your subscriber email list. Theres no gatekeeper that charges you every time you send an email, but subscribers are only valuable if you can reach them. Send out emails with evergreen, valuable content at the right time for each subscriber. This keeps them happy and satisfied with your product or service long after the initial transaction.

How Is Email Domain Reputation Calculated

Recipients maintain records of each time a domain is used in an email and how that message appears inside the inbox to evaluate domain reputation. Most ISPs employ extensive algorithms to “rate” a domain relying on the said information, then verify that score while processing future emails to create a level of reliability. The higher the domain reputation score at a specific recipient is, the more unlikely subsequent emails will be rejected or filtered as spam.

The sender domain’s reputation is also linked to the IP reputation. So if your domain is renowned on the internet for delivering unwanted emails, using a reliable and effective IP via the finest ESPs won’t work.

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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:

  • Sign in to your Postmaster tools account as the Postmaster account owner.
  • Point your cursor to one of your verified domains.
  • To the right of the domain,
  • on the bottom-right
  • A modal pop-up will appear. Type the email address of the Google Account you want to access your domains Postmaster Tools data. Our Deliverability team will provide you with the email address to use in your ticket.
  • Let the Deliverability team know that they have access to your Postmaster Data. Automatic notifications are not sent from Google.
  • Useful Resources About Dkim #

    How to Check your Email Reputation and Score

    Now that weve described what DKIM does, you can read the following two chapters in this guide:

    • Chapter 2, How does DKIM work?, is a technical deep-dive into how DKIM and DKIM records work
    • Chapter 3, How to set up DKIM, explains the general setup for DKIM as well as giving you video walkthroughs of setup on Google Domains, Cloudflare, and GoDaddy.

    You might also find the following implementation tools useful:

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    Lack Of Domain Authentication

    Before you start using your email domain for mass cold outreach, it is essential to proper the appropriate authentication protocols for it.

    SPF , DKIM , and DMARC are all methods of authenticating email. They help to ensure that the email is coming from the legitimate source, and not from a spammer or phisher.

    Just setting up these three authentication protocols will massively increase the trustworthiness of your email domain in the eyes of ESPs, and greatly improve your email deliverability.

    Send Only Transactional Emails From Your Email Subdomain

    This shouldnât be permanent. Weâll explain why in a moment.

    But transactional emails get excellent open rates and click-through rates, since they have a very specific purpose and people want to get receipts and shipping notifications.

    Again, sending transactional emails increases the chances that people will indicate that your emails are not spam.

    If your reputation improves and your emails eventually stop going to spam folders, you can start sending marketing emails from your email subdomain.

    Also, once youâve used your transactional emails to build a good sender reputation for your email subdomain, you should get a new IP address for sending transactional emails. Be sure to warm the new IP address up properly and follow the email reputation best practices to protect your transactional email IP address.

    The goal is to send your marketing emails from one IP address and your transactional emails from a separate IP address. That way, even if you make some deliverability mistakes in your marketing email program, your transactional emails will still make it to the inbox.

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    Domain Reputation Vs Ip Reputation

    An IP address is a number that identifies computers on the internet. Your IP address works a bit like an address that other computers use to find your computer on the internet.

    When you send an email, email service providers use the IP address attached to your sending domain to determine where the email came from. So, your IP address gets an email reputation score.

    Your domain is the name of your sending email server, which email servers can use to look up the IP address. Your domain also gets a reputation score.

    Hereâs why the difference between these two reputations is important:

    The IP address for your domain can be changed. And, when the IP address changes, the IP reputation gets reset.

    On the other hand, domain reputation gets attached to the domain name. So, your domain reputation will stay with your domain name, wherever it goes.

    In short, itâs much easier to fix your IP reputation than it is to repair your domain reputation.

    Since domain reputation is more permanent than IP reputation, many mailbox providers use domain reputation. But itâs not the universal standard, yet.

    Additionally, you may need to use multiple IP addresses if you send a lot of emails. So, you still need to keep an eye on your IP reputation.

    But, weâre going to focus mostly on domain reputation in this article, because repairing your domain reputation can be very challenging.

    How To Avoid Being Blacklisted

    How to Check &  Improve the Reputation of Your Domain

    To avoid the necessity to check if your domain is marked as spam, start to build a good sender reputation from the very start and your emails will be less likely to fail delivery to Inbox.

    • Use Double Opt-In. This way you can protect your base from bots, spam traps and invalid addresses. If you started collecting contacts before implementing DOI, ask these people to confirm their addresses.
    • Verify your domain.
    • Watch after your contact base hygiene. Dont hesitate to delete contacts who havent opened your emails for a long time. Some boxes could have turned into spam traps or ceased to exist. Therefore, it is necessary to clean the base regularly.
    • Add a captcha to the subscription form. It will protect you from bots.
    • Register with postmasters and monitor your sender reputation.
    • Regularly check spam databases.
    • Pay attention to the error rate in your reports. In eSputnik, for example, you can see why your delivery failed. If the reason is Message blocked due to spam content in the message, you need to revise your content strategy.

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    Lower Than Average Email Open Rates

    The first sign of a deliverability problem is usually low/declining open rates – often with click rates that remain steady.

    Open rate is an imperfect metric, but it’s fair to say that if your open rate is significantly below the average for your industry, you likely have an email deliverability problem. While its true, poor quality content, seasonality and many other factors can influence open rates for business email, a longer term downward trend usually indicates a problem.

    Open rates vary by industry. Take a look at the chart below that shows average email open rates by industry to see how you stack up.

    The average email open rate across all industries is 22.86%. A 2%, 4% or even 10% open rate is below average in any industry. If your open rate is this low, you likely have a deliverability issue.

    So how can you make sure your domain reputation stay health and emails don’t land in spam?

    What Is Domain Grade Used For

    Or to put simply, why do you need to check your rating of domain?

    Here are a few things you can do with Web Rating:

  • To benchmark against all other indexable websites on the web: Much like Alexa Rank, DR gives you an idea of how your website stacks up when measuring or comparing against every other website in the world .
  • To measure up against your competitors: Comparing your Domain Grade to other websites in your niche can give you a lot of additional insight about the link popularity of your own website. This helps you discover competitors whore doing better than you so you can piggyback from their backlink profile. You also get to see those you’re doing better than so you can monitor if they are catching up with you.
  • To perform link prospecting: Let’s say you want to get a backlink from a site. By checking the dns value of the site, you immediately get an insight on the value that youre going to get in exchange for your efforts. This is easy because url value is meant to show the relative link popularity of a given website, which directly shows the value you’re going to get from their link back.
  • Now that you know what dns reputation is used for, it’s time to actually start checking it. And the way to do that is to use a tool for checking dns value. Meet Bulk Domain Rank Checker, SmallSEOTools web application for looking up your site’s Url Grade fast.

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    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.

    How To Monitor & Maintain Domain Reputation

    How To Check If Your Email Domain Is Blacklisted.ð?ð©

    Every Email Service Provider calculates their own reputation for your email domain. For instance, Gmail comprises one domain reputation, similarly Yahoo! Has a different reputation score as well.

    The email service providers are able to measure domain reputation based on the emails they receive. They are not able to view the email sent to other inbox providers.

    Hence, when you perform a domain reputation check, the tools gather reputation scores from other email providers and provide a sort of average score.

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    What Is Domain Rating

    Dns Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs metric that shows the link popularity of your website compared to all other websites in the world.

    It shows the strength of a given websites overall backlink profile and is measured on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.

    • Link popularity refers to a specific way that Ahrefs calculates website rating.
    • Logarithmic scale means that the gap between DR 8283 is much bigger than the one between DR 22-23. In other words, the higher your DR gets, the more challenging it will be to grow it by another few points.

    Website Domain check is one of the most prominent metrics in Ahrefs that you can see it in nearly every of their report.

    Lots of people check it religiously because it gives an idea of how well a website is doing in terms of links.

    Domain Grade is not about the keywords your website ranks for, the search traffic it gets or some type of website authority that your site has. Instead, it is primarily a calculation of your backlink profile.

    Regularly Look For Ip And Domain Deny Listings

    When your email sending is generating too many negative signals such as spam complaints or delivery to spam traps or honeypot addresses, it is likely you will see increased deny listings of your IP, your domain, or both. While not all deny lists have a significant impact on your delivery rates, seeing increases in deny listing events for your sending is an indicator that your sending reputation is suffering. A great, free tool to use to keep an eye out for deny listings is

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    S To Improve Your Domain Reputation

    To improve domain reputation, try the following-

    • Ensure that all the authentication techniques are in place.

    • Try double opt-in or confirmations when adding subscribers to your database.

    • Regularly clean your email lists.

    • Avoid getting blacklisted or constantly checking whether your domain has been blacklisted.

    • Ensure proper frequency and timing of the emails.

    How To Establish Domain Reputation

    Domain Reputation Check Ipvoid

    If your domain is newer, you will have to be careful as you start out. Make sure youre building a positive domain reputation right off the bat. You dont want to start at a disadvantage because you made a silly mistake.

    You should always avoid sending emails to people who havent specifically opted into your brands messaging. Many of these could be pristine spam traps, and you have a higher likelihood of getting reported as spam by people who never consented to receive your emails.

    To make a good impression on email providers, you should establish a proper email cadence to control your volume and consistency.

    If youre sending multiple emails every day at random times, it will be suspicious. But establishing a regular cadence shows legitimacy and professionalism. A prospecting cadence that doesnt only focus on emails can also appear less spammy to email providers.

    Its also important to be patient and avoid doing too much too soon. Remember, the age of your domain matters, so build up your email marketing slowly to build a positive reputation over time.

    Ensure that youre keeping your email list updated. If people are unsubscribing, you should ensure that youre removing them. Not only is ignoring an unsubscribe request going to tarnish your domain reputation scores, but it could also land you in legal trouble, especially after GDPR and CCPA.

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    Establishing A Reputation From Scratch

    One important thing to mention is that it takes some time to establish a reputation. A relatively new domain or IP wont have an email reputation attached , so youll want to start sending a few emails at a time and slowly ramp up to higher volumes.

    That being said, you cant start an email marketing campaign with a massive list and a brand new IP and expect to succeed. If you start sending to a million people on your list on day one, the mailbox providers are unlikely to deliver all those messages. They have to get to know you first, so youll need to warm up your reputation by taking it slow.

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