How to avoid getting your website blacklisted

If you have a website the last thing you want to do is get it blacklisted. There are a few important things you need to know to ensure that you never get on a blacklist.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term blacklist, it simply means you have meet with the disapproval of others. In the case of an online blacklist (or blocklist as it also known), this would mean that someone has deemed you responsible for generating spam.

Spam is a no-no in the online world. Spam is essentially unsolicited mail.

Blacklists are a tool used to get rid of spam and spammers in general. What happens is that someone reports you to a spam fighting organizations and your IP address (or the IP address the spam originated from is added to blacklisted (or blocked) IP address list.

For those that aren’t familiar with what an IP address is, it is simply the unique location of your website on the Internet. In other words, it is your online home address; every website has a matching IP address.

You see all the email that originates from your website domain also has a corresponding IP address. Therefore if you are blacklisted you are potentially wasting your time sending email to customers because no one will actually see it.

So don’t send unsolicited emails! Make sure the recipients of your emails want what you are sending them. Otherwise you may find that you are blacklisted which can be really bad for your business in general.

You see what happens is most modern spam blockers also come with common blacklists installed. Some programs may also permit you to import updated blacklists into your spam blocker. The advantage to this is that you can block out a considerable amount of spam but you may also experience the downside and end up blocking legitimate email.

In my next post I will look at the two types of IP addresses and explain why blacklists are a necessary evil.