Is your website blacklisted?

Enter the website address and find out if it is on any of the RBL spam lists or the Google Safe Search blacklist.

Spam Blacklists

When you log into your email inbox every day, in addition to important emails you might get to see a bunch of advertising and marketing emails. Though some of them might actually succeed in spiking your interest, others might simply end up getting deleted. Now while you may think that with that deletion your inbox will be free of such irrelevant emails, the fact is that when you log in the next day, you might find just as many advertising and marketing emails piled up there again.

Why? Because of something called email spamming. Email spamming is a push marketing technique used by numerous businesses to reach potential customers. Such businesses often maintain a directory of email addresses and use an automated system to send the same emails to these addresses in bulk, day in and day out. Contrary to what we believe, the strategy actually helps them convert quite a lot of customers regularly.

But as an end user, having your email inbox flooded with spam emails can be annoying; which is why you might want to stay away from them. The technique used to make this possible is spam blacklisting.

What is a Spam Blacklist?

A spam blacklist is a list of IP addresses that are known and identified to send large volumes of unsolicited email. Such a list is used to keep spam out of business networks and is mostly used by ISPs, free mailbox providers, and anti-spam vendors in conjunction with spam blocking software to keep bulk unsolicited emails from reaching end users. While some prominent ISPs maintain their own internal spam blacklists, many others depend on publicly accessible blacklists maintained by companies that specialize in this field.

Although having a spam blacklist on a server can prevent a lot of unsolicited email from getting through, there’s always a slight chance that an automated spam blocking tool will blacklist legitimate emails as well. That’s the reason why some spam prevention software is programmed to distinguish particular IP addresses (or even specific domain names) that should be permitted to move through, regardless of how many similar emails the server receives.

How to check if my website is blacklisted?

If you’re a business owner who relies on email marketing for promoting your products and services, you could quite possibly end up on a spam blacklist, and that could impact your business significantly. As such, it’s important to find out whether your IP address is on the blacklist so that you can take the necessary steps to remove it from there. Surveys indicate that business websites often see a 95% drop in traffic if they’re placed on the blacklist.

There are various methods to check if your website or IP address is on a spam blacklist:

Check Google’s blacklist

You can easily find the last time when Google indexed your website and discovered malicious content through Google Search Console. Simply go to the What Happened When Google Last Visited This Website section to check and make any updates. After making improvements, you can also use Google’s Webmaster Tools to request a malware check. Within a few hours, Google blacklist search will rescan your website for malware. If your website is on the blacklist, the check date and the date of malware detection are normally the same.

Examine your metrics

If the organic visits on your website have fallen drastically (for example from 30% to 5%), you should know that something is wrong. It’s a clear indication that your marketing emails are being lost somewhere along the way. This may be due to blacklisting, authentication failures, or other problems.

Keep an eye out for Google’s security alerts

When Google suspects that a website contains malware and spam pages, it displays a dangerous looking alert saying “This Site Could Be Hacked” when you visit it. Such an alert won’t be shown on a red screen notification, but you’ll find it on the Google search results page, displayed in blue color right below the website address. Ensure this isn’t being done for your website.

Find assistance from reputable websites

If you’re having trouble determining whether or not your website is on Google’s blacklist, you can take the help of online tools specially built for this purpose. There are several such scanning tools available on the internet that will search your website and alert you about malicious content or spam links. These websites will also check the Google blacklist and other blacklists on the internet for your website and notify you if it appears on any of them. You will also obtain assistance in removing the malware, restoring site protection, and removing your site from the Google blacklist as quickly as possible.

Send out a few test emails

Sending test emails to a list of known email addresses and checking whether they get delivered to the inbox or the spam folder is also a fairly simple technique.

Note: If nothing else works, you can use the free tool above to check if your website is on a spam blacklist.