Who are you in bed with? (Techy Alert)
That might seem like a strange question for a Internet marketing newsletter, although as you might have guessed it’s perhaps not what you first thought of!
I recently moved the hosting of my wife’s website and subsequently had problems with the email delivery from the email accounts associated with that domain (that being that they were bounceback saying that the email address or IP was on a blacklist). Now my wife goes about her business sending 2 or 3 emails a day and certainly does not spam. So I assumed that her account must have in fact and set about resetting the password and the usual tricks and notifying the various spam filters that the account was clean, a job in itself.
My wife continued to have problems even though I had messages back saying that her email address have been blocked but there are emails were still at best ending up in people’s junk/spam folders and at worst not getting through at all.
Now let me roll things back slightly here, whenever I take out a hosting account I always pay the extra for a unique IP address.
I set about investigating further and decided to see what other websites were hosted on the same IP as my wife’s website (this should have been six sites).
To my horror I got varying results up to 350 sites including several “adult” sites. As you can imagine I was not best pleased. Whilst I have taken the matter up with the hosting company who eventually after several goes admitted that I was paying for a unique IP address but that my account had been set up incorrectly. I wonder how many people have a check that they are getting what they paid for?
My account has now been moved to a unique IP and all is well.
Now whilst my ramblings related to email delivery Google also take into account your bedfellows when deciding on your ranking and suitability. So if your website is hosted on an IP with a load of spamming sites in Google will put you in the same bracket as it’ll just make it harder for you to get rankings and traffic.
I have listed below some brief resources so that you can check out your own IP and whether it is clean or not.
Resources All free.
Reverse IP Checkers
Good site with feedback on possible doggy sites
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/
Comprehensive list of sites on your IP
http://viewdns.info/reverseip/
lots of info but only 25 results (on free account or 10 without loggiing in) less returns but more info on each
http://www.pagesinventory.com/
if you don’t know your IP find out here
http://www.iwebtool.com/reverse_ip
or Good site
http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check
http://www.dnsbl.info/
http://www.blacklistalert.org/
Enter you domain in this one. Lots of info and advice but very techy, best avoided unless you know what it all means, otherwise it will concern you unnecessarily.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
Spam email checker
http://viewdns.info/spamdblookup
OK but not comprehensive
http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
