How to Monitor and Maintain Your Domain Reputation?

The performance of email-based marketing and advertising campaigns crucially depends upon various factors that make up overall domain reputation. The exercise doesn’t stop at designing a robust email campaign—domain reputation monitoring plays a vital role in its success.

After all, it’s the email domain reputation that determines whether your email finds a space in the inbox or ends up in the spam folder. 

This is exactly like the loan credit score in banking. The better your score is, the higher the chance of having your loans approved by the banks.

So, learn more about domain reputation management and its techniques in this detailed article. 

Use Free Domain Reputation Checkers

Domain reputation is like a scoreboard ranging from 0 to 100. Each domain has a specific score, which of course, can improve or deteriorate depending on various factors. It’s important to know how to check your domain reputation to ensure your emails land up in the inbox only. 

You can use EasyDMARC’s free domain reputation checker to monitor your domain reputation and our domain tester diagnostic tool to run domain health tests quickly.

However, EasyDMARC’s Enterprise package allows you to check a domain’s reputation automatically and get alerts about any changes to the domain standing. This tool makes it much easier to maintain and improve your website score.

The tools reveal only a chunk of information to the public. Otherwise, cybercriminals would take advantage of all information shared by receivers about a domain. They can still use tactics to beat the system and pass through security filters. 

Check IP and Domain Deny Lists

First of all, let’s learn what IP and domain deny lists or blocklists are.

They’re lists of IP addresses and domains that users can’t access as they’re blocked by servers. This could be due to one or more of the various reasons that we’ll discuss later in this blog.

There are many tools that can tell if your IP address and domain name are on a  blocklist. So, if they are, you need to work on domain reputation management. These tools let you know if a URL is in the Domain Name System Based List database (DNSBL), which is based on the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS).

Generally, cybercriminals use IP addresses and domains that aren’t in use for a good long time. This helps them hide their identity. When a third-party server detects too much traffic coming from a previously inactive address, it adds it to the IP and domain deny list or blocklist.

Why is Your Domain on the Blocklist?

If you witness an error stating ‘Destination Host Blacklisted,’ take it as a sign that someone might be misusing your domain name for malicious activities.

To understand the fundamentals of domain reputation management, you should be aware of the common reasons or practices that can land you on that list, such as:

• A user entered the wrong spelling in the search bar
• A third-party site perceived your website as a replica of an original one
• Your competitors extracted your DNS record
• Your website has copied content
• A user found your website inauthentic and reported it
• Your IP history has poorly deteriorated as some users downloaded malware
• Your website has been bulk-reported due to offensive, deceiving, malicious, or explicit content

When to Run a Domain Blocklist Check?

Domain reputation monitoring should start from the very first day. The intensity of this amplifies if your business is heavily dependent on sending emails for marketing, communication, or general notifications.

The tactics of domain reputation management can save your brand name and help in leading successful email campaigns. Hence, you should know when and how often to run a domain blocklist check.

• New domain name: Check all the key metrics, including the domain blocklist check, before paying for a new domain name. This is your first step towards domain reputation monitoring.
• Poor ranking: This era is all about SEO ranking; the better you rank on Google, the more your sales chart will flourish. If you’re putting your best foot forward, and despite that, your ranking doesn’t or,, rather, it’s constantly deteriorating, then your website is on the blocklist. In this case, all your domain reputation management efforts will fail.

How To Get Your Domain Name Off of the Blocklist?

Fixing your domain reputation starts with ensuring that it’s 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.

Send Yourself Messages

It’s a good idea to send yourself messages for domain reputation monitoring to give you an idea of how an email provider treats them. To check your domain reputation this way, you need multiple email IDs on different mailbox platforms like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and more. You can’t presume domain performance based on just a single email address.

If your emails are landing right in the inbox folder, your domain reputation management drill is working flawlessly. However, if they’re dropping into the spam folder, it’s a sign of a degraded reputation.

You have another option with EasyDMARC. Our new warmup tool prepares your email for upcoming campaigns. Whether your address is new or you’ve had issues in the past, this solution works. Contact our support team for more information.

Technical Help

Final Thoughts

Whether you use an email address for marketing campaigns or not, keeping your domain and IP reputation on the healthy side is important.

Domain reputation management helps you gain clarity on how your emails are treated. So, being proactively engaged in learning how to fix your domain reputation significantly improves email deliverability, too.