Boost Your Emails Past the Spam Filter and to the Inbox

Want to skip the spam folder and see your emails reliably reach the inbox? A positive sender reputation is the key that unlocks better deliverability. Learn how leading platforms like Gmail calculate your score, essential factors that shape it, and tips to fix a damaged reputation.

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Understanding Email and Web Reputation Scores

In the digital age, reputation matters more than ever. Whether you’re sending emails or want your website to rank well in search engines, your online reputation can make or break your deliverability and success. That’s where reputation scores come in – they provide an inside look at how you’re perceived across the web.
Let’s break down exactly what reputation scores are, why they’re so crucial for marketers and companies today, and how the major players like Talos and Google calculate them.

What are Reputation Scores?

A reputation score is a number or rating that reflects the reputation of an IP address, domain, or email sender. It’s a way for email providers and search engines to gauge trustworthiness and assign a “reputation level” accordingly.

For email senders, factors like complaint rates, spam reports, and engagement metrics determine the score. For websites and domains, it may include the site’s history, security, content quality, search rankings, and brand mentions.

Higher scores indicate a good reputation and improved deliverability. Lower scores suggest high-risk, which can lead to email blocks or poor search visibility.

Why Do Reputation Scores Matter?

In short, they matter because they directly impact your deliverability and success.

Email providers use reputation scores to filter out spammers and low-quality senders. If your sender score is too low, your emails will land in spam or get blocked entirely. You want to maintain a good score so providers trust your mail reaches the inbox.

Similarly, search engines factor in web and domain reputation when ranking pages. Sites with better reputations tend to rank higher and appear more prominent in results. A poor reputation score can sink your pages down the SERPs.

How Are the Scores Calculated?

The exact algorithms used to determine reputation scores are proprietary secrets. But we can look at the types of data points and metrics the major email and search providers analyze:

Talos Reputation Score

Cisco Talos gathers extensive telemetry data across millions of networks and devices worldwide. For email IPs, relevant factors include:

  • Complaint rates – How often recipients mark your messages as spam or abusive.
  • Spam traps – Detecting when your mail goes to honeypot addresses not tied to real users.
  • Authentication records – Checking for valid SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup.
  • Volume and traffic patterns – Monitoring any unusually high sending activity.

For web and domain reputation, Talos examines elements like:

  • Domain history – How long the site has been registered and active.
  • Hosting practices – Use of shared vs. dedicated IPs.
  • Malware patterns – Any signs of infections or suspicious content.
  • Network owner data – Verifying the registered domain contact info.

Gmail Postmaster Score

Google uses extensive internal signals and data points from Gmail to determine Postmaster Scores. Key inputs include:

  • User complaints – Spam reports directly from Gmail subscribers.
  • Spam filter catches – Messages labeled as spam by Gmail’s algorithms.
  • Bounce rates – Instances of emails bouncing back or failing delivery.
  • Email volume – Total number of messages sent.
  • Engagement metrics – Open and click-through rates.

For domains, Google also analyzes:

  • Traffic patterns – Any unusual or suspicious sending activity.
  • Public blacklists – Listings as spam by services like Spamhaus.
  • Link safety – Presence of malware or phishing content.
  • Site security – Use of TLS encryption and other protocols.

Other Providers

Services like Return Path assign scores based on factors like complaint rates, spam trap hits, and authentication records.

BrightCloud uses a varied data set of network intelligence signals, including spamming patterns, malicious content, and botnet activity.

How Scores Are Used by Email and Web Platforms

Email providers leverage scores to categorize senders into reputation tiers. Senders with excellent scores get the best treatment, while low scores face high-risk filtering.

For example, Gmail assigns these reputation levels:

  • Bad – Almost always filtered as spam.
  • Poor – Likely to be marked as spam.
  • Fair – Moderate deliverability with occasional blocks.
  • Good – Rarely filtered and trusted sender.

Search engines use web and domain reputations to aid ranking and indexing decisions. Pages with better reputations tend to rank higher in SERPs. Those with poor reputations can be buried or even excluded entirely.

In summary, reputation scores offer a standardized way for platforms to evaluate trust and assign levels of access accordingly. Senders and sites with good scores reap the benefits, while low scores lead to deliverability hurdles. Understanding how these scores work is key for email marketers and website owners alike in 2023.

Key Factors That Impact Your Email Reputation

Getting your emails into the inbox is no easy feat nowadays. Providers have complex filters and algorithms in place to detect high-risk and low-quality senders. To reliably hit the inbox, you need a stellar email reputation score.
But how exactly is that score determined in the first place? What elements carry the most weight when calculating a sender’s reputation?

Understanding the key factors that shape your email reputation is crucial. Let’s examine some of the top elements that can make or break your sender score.

Your Sending Behavior and Volume

One of the most important factors in determining your email reputation is your overall sending behavior. Both the volume and patterns of the messages you send will be closely analyzed.

Volume

Sending an extremely large number of emails can throw up red flags and hurt your reputation. Providers will suspect you’re a spammer blasting messages in bulk. Even if the content looks legitimate, the sheer volume appears suspicious.

Aim to keep your email volume within reasonable limits that recipients would normally expect from your business. Ramp up gradually as you build deliverability, rather than bombarding inboxes all at once.

Sudden spikes in volume can also damage your reputation. Say you typically send 50,000 emails per month. If you suddenly jump to 500,000 emails, providers will view that rise with skepticism.

Patterns

Beyond volume, your general sending patterns also matter. Do you send in predictable daily batches at normal business hours? Or do emails go out erratically at 3 AM in random spurts?

Consistent, expected patterns strengthen your reputation. Strange off-hour spikes or random blasts suggest you may be an undisciplined sender at best or a spammer at worst.

List Hygiene

Keeping your lists clean and up-to-date is critical for reputable sending. Only message subscribers who have specifically consented and engaged with your emails recently. Prune inactive subscribers who haven’t opened in 6-12 months.

Watch out for potential spammers or compromised accounts subscribing. Use double opt-in and screening to keep lists tidy.

Spam Complaints and Blocks

Nothing hurts your sender score more than recipients manually flagging your mail as junk. Every complaint acts like a vote against your reputation. Too many, and you end up in spam territory.

Complaint rates depend partly on your business and audience. For example, a marketing email list may generate more spam complaints than a utility company messaging customers.

As a rule of thumb, try to keep complaints below 0.1% of subscribers. Even 0.5% can be damaging if you send high volumes. Identify and remove complainers to shed dead weight.

Blocks also factor into your reputation. If major ISPs like Yahoo or Outlook ban your IP, it’s a huge blow. Avoid practices that might trigger blocking, like suspicious content or intense blasting.

Authentication Issues

Proper email authentication is required to build sender credibility these days. When authentication fails or is not setup at all, your deliverability suffers.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are the core protocols involved:

  • SPF – Validates sending IP addresses.
  • DKIM – Confirms email hasn’t been tampered with.
  • DMARC – Aligns SPF and DKIM for domain.

If SPF fails, it signals your IP may lack credibility to send mail, hurting reputation. Invalid DKIM suggests emails lack integrity or try to obscure origins. Misaligned DMARC implies poor configuration and hygiene practices.

monitoring authentication rates and fixing any issues is essential. At minimum, aim for 95% or higher on SPF and DKIM alignment rates.

Low Engagement Signals

Major platforms like Gmail analyze subscriber engagement with your emails when scoring reputation. If users consistently ignore your messages, it’s a negative signal.

Metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and reply rates help gauge engagement and interest. While not directly used in reputation scores, low engagement can indirectly hurt you.

For example, inactive users who never open your emails are more likely to complain and flag your messages as spam. This damages your complaint rates and reputation.

An especially harmful signal is high bounce rates. Bounces indicate bad addresses in your lists, which reduces credibility. Try to keep hard bounce rates below 5% as a best practice.

In summary, these are the most crucial elements providers analyze to determine your sender reputation. Focus on sending reasonable volumes in clean patterns, minimizing complaints and blocks, configuring proper authentication, and boosting engagement to earn a stellar reputation.

Key Factors That Impact Your Web Reputation

Your website’s reputation plays a big role in how it ranks and performs in search engines. While Google uses over 200 ranking factors, a few key elements have an outsized impact on your overall web reputation.
Let’s explore the core factors that shape how search engines and users perceive a website, and what you can do to build up a stellar reputation.

Overall Quality and Security of Your Website

At its foundation, the reputation of a website comes down to its quality and security. Search engines like Google want to serve up the most authoritative and trustworthy sites.

High-Quality Content

Websites with in-depth, accurate information tend to have better reputations. Make sure each page offers valuable content that users want. Write clearly organized posts with carefully researched facts.

Thin, low-value pages stuffed awkwardly with keywords can hurt your reputation. Focus on quality over quantity in your content approach.

Technical SEO

How your site is built also matters. Make sure your developer properly optimizes title tags, metadata, site speed, responsive design, and other technical SEO elements. A site that ranks well on core technical factors demonstrates expertise.

Safety and Security

Google cares deeply about safety and security. Encrypt your site with HTTPS to show you take protection seriously.

Follow best practices like input validation and SQL injection prevention in your forms and database interactions. Monitor for malware and fix any vulnerabilities promptly.

User Experience

The user experience (UX) also contributes to overall website quality and reputation. Test your site from a visitor’s perspective. Identify any pain points in navigation or conversions and improve the experience.

For example, a confusing checkout process damages your ecommerce reputation. A site that looks dated or cluttered reflects poorly as well. Deliver an excellent UX to build credibility.

Length of Time Your Domain Has Been Registered

The track record of your domain matters when search engines evaluate web reputation. Sites with longer histories tend to be viewed more positively than brand new websites.

Some reasons why domain longevity boosts reputation:

  • It demonstrates commitment and stability in an industry.
  • You’ve had more time to build authority and citations.
  • Older domains are less likely to be spammy.
  • There’s a proven history of providing value to users.

Exact numbers can vary, but domains registered for at least two years tend to gain a degree of implied reputation. Anything younger than six months though can raise suspicions if other signals are lacking.

Presence of Negative Content About Your Brand

One big threat to your web reputation is negative content and press about your brand. Complaint sites, negative articles, and angry reviews can all surface prominently for your brand name.

This damaging content can sink your website’s reputation by portraying your brand in an unflattering light. Even a few negative results mixed among positive pages taints perception.

Carefully monitor what types of content come up for brand name searches. Look for problem sites you may need to address or bury with positive content.

Search Rankings for Your Brand Name and Web Pages

Your main website’s visibility and authority in search engines impacts reputation as well.

For example, if your brand name is nowhere to be found on the first pages of Google, it raises doubts. You would expect an authoritative site to at least rank well for its own brand keywords.

Similarly, consistently low search rankings for important pages and content undermines your reputation. As a trusted source, you should be able to rank well for industry topics related to your offerings.

Benchmark your core pages for ranking performance. Improve technical SEO and content quality as needed to boost your authority and search presence.

By keeping these key elements in check, you can better control how your overall website reputation evolves and solidify your brand as a trusted resource.

How to Monitor and Check Your Reputation Scores

Getting a clear picture of your current email and web reputation scores is critical. You can’t improve what you can’t measure.
Let’s explore some of the best tools and techniques to monitor your scores and diagnose any deliverability or credibility issues impacting them:

Leverage Reputation Monitoring Tools

Dedicated reputation monitoring tools offer the most comprehensive way to stay on top of your scores.

Talos Reputation Center

Cisco Talos’s reputation center lets you lookup the threat levels assigned to your IPs, domains, and email senders.

You simply enter an IP, domain, or email address to see its reputation score and category like “Favorable” or “Untrusted.” This helps reveal any black marks hurting your standing.

For email IPs, you also get helpful details like the spam rate percentage and volume patterns. The Talos portal will even suggest steps to clean up a bad reputation.

Gmail Postmaster Tools

Google’s Postmaster Tools is a must for monitoring Gmail metrics and reputation. Connect your sending domains to view delivery errors, spam rates, authentication stats, and other data.

This inside intel directly from Gmail helps you diagnose issues specific to your Gmail deliverability. You can even submit mail samples for Google to re-check if you feel scores are inaccurate.

Third-Party Lookup Tools

In addition to the major platforms, third-party lookup tools like MXToolbox and IPQualityScore let you check blacklisting status and some reputation signals.

However, these tools may not give you a full picture compared to going directly to the source with Talos and Postmaster data. But they can provide quick high-level checks if needed.

Check Search Engine Results for Brand Mentions

Your web reputation also manifests in how search engines like Google display content related to your brand name.

Conduct vanity searches for your company, products, and executives to evaluate what comes up on the first pages. Surface any negative content dragging down your reputation.

Compare your own site’s rankings for branded keywords versus competitors. Consistently low rankings suggest a weak brand reputation in search.

If damaging results appear prominently, you may need reputation management support to bury or remove them.

Review Email Security and Authentication Protocols

Properly configuring email security and authentication protocols is vital for deliverability.

Use tools like MXToolbox or MailTester to analyze your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup. Identify any issues like missing records, misconfigurations, or misalignments lowering your authentication rates.

Also check that encryption is enabled with TLS to secure email in transit. Enforcing TLS prevents snooping and protects message integrity.

By regularly checking in on your scores and diagnosing problems early, you can react quickly to maintain positive email and web reputations. Don’t leave your rankings to chance.

Tips to Improve a Poor Reputation Score

Finding out you have a poor email or web reputation score can be disheartening. But all is not lost! With some diligent work, you can rehabilitate and boost your scores back up.
Let’s go over actionable tips to clean up and improve a troubled reputation step-by-step:

Adjust Your Sending Volume and List Hygiene Practices

If you’ve been labeled a spammer due to excessive volume or dirty lists, bringing your mailing habits back in line is key.

Carefully Reduce Volume

Don’t go cold turkey and stop all emails at once. This will shock your audience who expect messages. Gradually scale back volume week after week to find a stablesending rate.

Many reputable senders reduce volume by 30-50% initially, and then monitor feedback to guide further reductions.

For example, if you were sending 100,000 emails a day, cut back to 50-70,000/day. Give it 2 weeks, then try 30,000/day, and so on.

Prune Your Lists

Scrub your lists to keep only truly engaged and active contacts. Remove anyone who hasn’t opened in 6-12 months, as they are unlikely to be genuine subscribers.

Implement a double opt-in process for new sign-ups to confirm they want your mail. Periodically re-permission and check-in with subscribers to keep lists tight.

Aiming for open and click-through rates above 25% and 10% respectively help indicate you have an active audience.

Monitor and Reduce Complaints

Keep a close eye on complaint rates and spikes after adjusting your volume and lists. Complaints should fall as inactives and spammers drop off.

If certain segments generate more complaints, pause emails to those groups to identify issues. Improve the content before restarting messaging.

Overall, complaints below 0.1% of subscribers are ideal, 0.5% is average, and anything above 2% is dangerous.

Add Proper Email Authentication

If your reputation is hurt by authentication problems, fixing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC should be a top priority.

Strive for at least 98% alignment on both SPF and DKIM. Work with your IT team or provider to monitor and continuously improve authentication levels.

Proper authentication verifies you as a legitimate sender and prevents spoofing, boosting your credibility.

Clean Up Negative Content About Your Brand

For website reputation, cleaning up negative brand mentions is key.

  • Run searches to uncover bad press, reviews, forum posts, etc.
  • Remove outdated or irrelevant content from your site.
  • Publish new positive content about your brand.
  • Respond professionally to negative items you can’t remove.
  • Consider adding testimonials and awards to showcase credibility.

Burying negatives with pounds of positives helps reshape perceptions and improve your reputation.

Create Positive Brand Mentions and Content

To further boost your web reputation, focus heavily on building positive brand visibility through high-value content marketing.

  • Publish blog posts and videos that rank for your keywords.
  • Distribute great content to media outlets and industry websites.
  • Encourage customers to write reviews and testimonials.
  • Be an expert source for relevant stories in your niche.
  • Sponsor or speak at industry conferences and events.

Earned media exposure and expert positioning greatly enhance your brand’s reputation and authority.

Consider Warmup Services to Improve Deliverability

For urgent email delivery issues, sender warmup services can be useful. They gradually build up your IP or domain reputation using timed mailings.

Warmup helps re-establish positive sending patterns and engagement. Just be sure to also address underlying problems like dirty lists for long-term maintenance.

Depending on volume needs, warmup can take several weeks to months. So require patience and diligent monitoring.

With some concerted effort using the right strategies, you can rehabilitate even the poorest email or website reputation. But it takes significant time and commitment, so persistence is key.

Best Practices for Maintaining a Strong Reputation

Building a stellar email and web reputation takes time and care. But the effort is well worth it for long-term deliverability. Once you’ve achieved positive sender and site reputations, you’ll want to keep them intact through smart maintenance practices.
Let’s explore some of the top habits for sustaining strong email and web reputations month after month:

Only Send Emails to Engaged Subscribers

The foundation of reputable email marketing is mailing engaged subscribers who actually want to hear from you. Here are some tips for cultivating an active audience:

  • Confirm all new subscribers double opt-in.
  • Segment users based on engagement levels.
  • Send re-permission and preference checks periodically.
  • Prune contacts who haven’t opened in months.
  • Add unsubscribers immediately to suppression lists.
  • Provide profile and preference management options.

Keeping lists ultra-targeted reduces complaints, boosts open rates, and keeps your reputation pristine. Never buy or rent arbitrary mailing lists, which destroy sender credibility.

Send new subscribers a series of educational or promotional emails first before asking them to convert or buy. Build a relationship before pushing sales messages.

Operate Your Own Dedicated Sending Infrastructure

Rather than using a third-party mass mailing service, operating your own email server and IP addresses is ideal for reputation. This gives you full control and separation as an independent sender.

Dedicated IPs that solely send your mail establish positive patterns and history. Shared IPs used by others can’t affect your deliverability as easily.

Managing your own infrastructure also allows deeper customization of authentication protocols, tracking, analytics, and feedback flows.

Install Feedback Loops

Feedback loops provide monitoring of subscriber spam complaints, allowing you to identify and remove problematic members.

For example, tools like Amazon SES, SparkPost, and Mailgun integrate with ISP complaint systems. This gives visibility when your emails are reported as junk so you can take action.

By installing feedback loops, you can keep complaint rates low by culling users who don’t actually want your content.

Keep Your Website Content Fresh and Relevant

As Google’s algorithms evolve, websites need frequent content updates to stay competitive. Stale, outdated pages tank your rankings and credibility over time.

  • Publish new blog articles at least twice a month.
  • Refresh old content and add new facts/stats.
  • Promote fresh content through your email lists.
  • Swap in newer, relevant pages for stale ones.

Updating old pages helps make sure you rank for the latest industry developments vs old news.

Monitor Your Reputation Scores Regularly

Be proactive by checking your email and web reputation scores at least monthly, if not weekly. Use Postmaster Tools, Talos, and lookup sites to catch any fluctuations early.

Review your:

  • Email IP and domain reputation levels
  • Authentication rates
  • Spam complaints and blocks
  • Web search visibility and rankings
  • Brand name search results

Compare metrics to previous periods to spot downward trends before they spiral. Address even moderate drops quickly to prevent worse damage.

Maintaining strong reputation is an active endeavor requiring constant vigilance. But adhering to these best practices will help you sustain long-term email and search success.

Leveraging Reputation Scores for Better Email Marketing

Now that you understand the ins and outs of email reputation scores, let’s discuss how you can actually use them to improve your email marketing efforts.
Reputation scores provide valuable data to segment and personalize your outreach for higher engagement. Here are some smart ways to leverage reputation in your email campaigns:

Prioritize List Segmentation Based on Reputation Scores

Segment your subscriber lists according to reputation scores and levels. Group together subscribers with “good” vs “poor” reputation scores into separate segments.

This allows sending targeted content catered to each group’s perceived credibility. You can also set specific sending volume and schedules optimized per segment.

For example, start by sending more educational or low-commercial content to the lower reputation group. Once they engage more consistently, you can graduate them into segments that receive higher value offers and promotions.

Meanwhile, subscribers with good reputations can skip the basics and receive only your best commercial emails from the start.

Personalize Outreach to Low Reputation Subscribers

Subscribers who land in low reputation tiers due to inactivity or complaints need personalized re-engagement.

Send specific reactivation campaigns to these users:

  • Ask for feedback on why they’ve been inactive.
  • Provide preference centers to update their interests.
  • Feature links to your best old content in case they missed it.
  • Highlight subscribers-only perks and benefits.
  • Offer exclusive discounts or promotions to incentivize re-engagement.

Personalized outreach informs you of potential delivery issues while showing neglected subscribers they’re still valued. This gradually pulls them back into the fold.

Focus on Engagement Before Sending Promotional Content

When reaching out to low reputation subscribers, prioritize engagement over promotions at first. Too many ads and offers right away may trigger more complaints and unsubscribes.

Instead, share useful education, polls, surveys, and other interactive content without heavy sales pitches:

  • Send links to your latest helpful blog posts.
  • Ask for opinions on topics relevant to subscribers.
  • Provide special resources and insider tips just for them.
  • Reward survey participation with discounts or early access.

Gradually transition into promotions once subscribers re-engage so you don’t jeopardize your sender score improvements.

Test New Content on Higher Reputation Segments First

When creating a new email campaign, use your higher reputation segments as a safer test bed before full deployment.

For example, send the new email to engaged VIP subscribers first. If it drives solid open and click rates without complaints in that group, you can expand it to your general list.

But if the test flops, you can refine the content before potentially alienating subscribers in lower tiers with an untested concept. Their added complaints could tank your sender score.

In summary, savvy use of reputation data allows much more strategic email marketing. Take advantage of what you know about subscribers’ perceived credibility to send the right content to the right people.

Reputation Frequently Asked Questions

Let’s wrap up with answers to some common questions about improving and managing email and web reputation scores:

How Long Does it Take to Improve a Poor Reputation Score?

The timeline for improving a poor reputation varies case-by-case based on factors like:

  • How long you’ve been blacklisted.
  • The specifics of your sending behavior.
  • How severe your infractions are.

You may see initial progress within 4-6 weeks if you follow remediation best practices. However, expect the process to take at least 3-6 months for significant reversal, if not longer.

Patience and persistence are required when rebuilding reputation. There are no shortcuts, but you should see gradual improvement if you continually work at it.

Should I Warm Up a New Sending Domain?

Warming up a brand new domain before you start sending large volumes can be beneficial. Here are some guidelines:

However, warmup is not a fix for poor sending habits long term. You still need proper list hygiene, reasonable volumes, and authentication to sustain good deliverability.

What is an Acceptable Sender Reputation Score?

Acceptable email sender scores vary across providers:

  • Gmail Postmaster: Medium/Fair or higher
  • Return Path: Above 90
  • IPScore: Above 80
  • Spamhaus SBOMN: Under 3

Aim for the highest reputation tier possible, while keeping the minimum thresholds in mind.

For web and domain reputation, page one Google visibility for brand terms, plus positive brand mentions are key.

Does a Website’s Age Affect Its Reputation?

Yes, website age can influence reputation. Very young sites (under 6 months) face greater skepticism until they build history and authority.

Ideally, focus on improving reputation of older domains (2 years+) with existing equity versus trying to instantly boost brand new sites.

Quality content and links over time will gradually improve new site reputation as they mature. But building initial trust takes perseverance.

So in summary, focus on playing the long game as you cultivate your online email sender and website reputations. Consistency and diligence in following best practices wins over quick fixes.

Key Takeaways

The reputation of your email sending and website matters more than ever today. To wrap up, keep these core lessons in mind:

  • Monitor your email and web reputation scores regularly via tools like Talos and Gmail Postmaster.
  • Watch for issues with sending volumes, complaint rates, and authentication that may hurt your sender score.
  • Keep email lists clean and only message engaged subscribers to nurture positive engagement.
  • On websites, focus on security, positive branding, and frequently updated content to build reputation.
  • Diagnose and fix any deliverability or credibility issues early before they escalate.
  • Leverage the unique strengths of your different audience segments when optimizing email reputation.
  • Take a methodical approach by following best practices continuously over time to improve scores.

A strong positive reputation is hard to earn but easy to lose. Diligence and vigilance will pay off with high inbox placement rates, better website visibility, and ultimately, more opportunities to connect with your audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between IP reputation and domain reputation?
IP reputation refers to the reputation score assigned to a specific sending IP address. Domain reputation is based on the domain used for sending email, like yourcompany.com. IP and domain reputations can differ if you use multiple IPs or domains.

How often should I check my reputation scores?

Aim to monitor your key email and web reputation scores at least monthly, if not weekly or daily. Frequently checking your standings allows you to catch issues early before they snowball.

What is an acceptable email inbox placement rate?

For business emails, an inbox placement rate around 90% or higher is ideal. Placement rates below 85% suggest issues hurting your sender reputation and deliverability.

How much can negative brand mentions affect my website’s reputation?

Just a few negative brand mentions on page one of search can significantly hurt your overall website reputation. Bury them with proactive positive content marketing and branding.

Is it better to have dedicated IPs versus shared IPs?

Using dedicated IPs that only send your mail can help protect your sender reputation versus shared IPs also used by others. However, proper sending practices matter most.

How long does it take for a new domain to build a good reputation?

Expect it to take at least 6-12 months for a brand new domain to cultivate positive reputation factors like history, trust, and citation links. Patience is key.

Can I completely remove old negative reputation factors?

While you can’t erase reputation history, you can dilute it by consistently generating new positive factors like good content, links, and reviews over an extended period.