Google Blacklisted Sites: 6 Ways to Check Your Status
Understanding Website Blacklisting and Its Consequences
Consider the effort invested in establishing a business and developing its online presence. Launching a promotional email campaign to attract new customers with significant savings is a common strategy.
However, questions may arise: Was the email sent to an excessive number of recipients, or was the targeting inaccurate? Could a recipient have flagged your communication as spam to a blacklist organization?
The Two Types of Blacklists
Spam is universally disliked, and being labeled a spammer is detrimental. This represents one type of blacklist. However, a search engine blacklist is considerably more severe.
Such a listing can effectively cripple a website, as Google and other search engines may cease crawling or indexing it. Consequently, the site disappears from search results.
No blacklist is desirable, as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content filtering services utilize these lists to determine which emails and websites to block or flag as potentially harmful.
Detecting Blacklisting
How can you determine if your website has been included on the Google List or any other database of blacklisted sites?
Identifying a listing is the first step toward remediation. Several online tools are available to check your site’s status across various blacklists.
- Regularly monitoring your website’s reputation is crucial.
- Promptly addressing any issues that could lead to blacklisting is essential.
- Maintaining a clean email list and adhering to best practices for email marketing can help prevent being flagged as a spammer.
Google and other search engines prioritize user experience, and blacklisting is a severe penalty for violating their guidelines.
Determining if Your Site is Listed on Blacklists
Numerous databases, potentially numbering in the thousands, maintain records of “abusive hosts” for use by email filtering systems and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). These entities seek lists of known problematic URLs and IP addresses to block, safeguarding their clients from potential malware, viruses, and other undesirable online content.
A widely recognized list is known as The Abusive Hosts Blocking List, a comprehensive database of hosts identified as abusive. While primarily used to identify email spam sources, inclusion on this list can hinder email delivery, disrupting regular operations.
The AHBL website provides a lookup feature allowing you to check if your domain appears on their list. Should your domain be listed, the results will offer guidance on the removal process, if available.
Although manually checking each database is possible, utilizing a service like BlackListAlert offers a more efficient solution. This service performs searches across multiple databases on your behalf, and is currently the most utilized blacklist checking service available.
Simply enter your domain, and the site will present a list of blocklists in alphabetical order. A green "OK" indicates your domain is not listed, while a red "Listed!" signifies inclusion on that particular blacklist. In the latter case, you should consult the individual database’s policies for removal procedures.
MX Toolbox is another popular tool for searching multiple blacklists, displaying results in a similar format to BlackListAlert.
A beneficial feature of MX Toolbox is its potential to display the "Reason" for your listing directly on the results page, if a known cause exists. The service also offers a paid monitoring feature that alerts you if your domain is added to any blacklist.
WhatIsMyIPAddress, commonly used to determine your current IP address, also includes a blacklist check tool for both IP addresses and domains.
This provides a quick method for troubleshooting email delivery issues, determining if your IP address has been inadvertently blacklisted by the recipient’s mail server.
The results are presented as follows:
Green signifies a clean status, grey indicates an offline database, and red denotes a listing. A completely green result is the desired outcome.
BlacklistMonitoring is another straightforward service for checking blacklists. Like the others, it queries each database and displays either a green "Not Found" or a red status if your domain is listed.
Generally, if you have not engaged in unsolicited mass emailing or any form of spamming, you should not find yourself on any blacklisted sites.
If your primary concern is the Google blacklist – the list of sites Google refuses to crawl or display in search results – then Google Webmaster Tools is the essential resource. Register an account for your domain if you haven’t already.
The quickest indicator of being blacklisted by Google is a cessation of crawling by Googlebot. This information is available within Webmaster Tools under Diagnostics, then Crawl Stats.
This graph accurately reflects the number of pages crawled by Googlebot each day. You can verify its accuracy by correlating it with known server outages or other issues. A sustained drop to zero indicates a potential blacklisting.
These are all the methods available to determine if you are listed in any blacklist database, and specifically, whether you are on Google’s blacklist.
Have you ever experienced being blacklisted? Were you able to have your site removed? Share your experiences and insights in the comments below.
Image credit: Spam Mail Email via Shutterstock
