Website blacklist is a thing from which even the most innocuous websites are not immune. For example, due to the fact that they happened to be on the same hosting or physical server with spammers, scammers and other banned websites. It’s enough to accidentally get into the same IP pool with them. Thus, your website will also be in blacklists of some ISPs. Or, worse, DNSBL will add an entire web hosting along with all websites based on it.
DNSBL, as the name suggests, is a DNS-based blacklist. DNSBL gets domain names and/or IP addresses. But the promiscuity of hosting for clients and the unfortunate fact that your website at some point turned out to be at the same address with conditional scammers are not the only causes of trouble. The lists are compiled according to several criteria.
Reasons to include website to DNSBL
Everyone can create their own DNSBL list by compiling it together with their expert opinion and experiencing all the shortcomings of their education and childhood grievances. It could just be the intensity of the mailing list or something more interesting. Its timely distribution, the use of repeated mailing lists, etc.
Another reason may be an incorrect configuration of the mail server. This may be the absence of an important entry in the configuration. Or open ports. Or a potential vulnerability of the operating system on this server. The criteria may change over time.
And another, not yet so common reason is user complaints to hosting owners. It means literally what is written there. If users send a couple of angry emails to the hosting owner. Or it may be fake complaints from the owners of competitor websites. Hosting administrators in most cases blacklist web resources. Both cases practically guarantee that the violator (even falsely accused) will be blacklisted without further investigation. Literally in two clicks of the hosting support service.
Solutions for monitoring website presence in DNSBLs
There are many DNSBL lists, and some of them have gained a reputation and a certain weight over the years. If the list really allows you to filter out spam or other unwanted actions, various services start using it. And the consequences can be very diverse. Emails stop coming, or they automatically end up in spam. Visitors receive warnings about fraud. Or the website has disappeared from some of the directories it was previously in, and so on. The result is usually the same – the website loses a lot of potential customers.
It is important to make sure that the website is not in any of these databases. To make sure that a website, domain, or IP address is not on any of the popular DNS blacklists, you can use, for example, a quick DNSBL check provided by HostTracker to determine if a particular website is blacklisted. This check will scan DNSBLs and if it detects a website’s presence, it will create a corresponding notification.
In such cases the main thing for a webmaster is to react quickly. The less time a website will be on the list, the less likely problems will occur. To avoid doing all mentioned above manually, the HostTracker website monitoring service allows you to use regular DNSBL checks automatically. Combined with extensive website stability and performance monitoring capabilities, this service will allow the website owner or webmaster to be constantly aware of the situation.
