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What to do about flagged domain? (40)

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Running my first campaign on mobile and noticed after 2 days my domain has gotten flagged for "deceptive site". My converting lander has that warning come up, and now none of my landers displays correctly when using firefox and google chrome. When using cloudfronts URL for my landers everything displays ok so I know its not something wrong with the HTML or JS. When using my domain is the problem.

Do this happen often when running sweepstakes campaigns on mobile? What do I need to do to fix this?

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Happens regularly and you should change domains usually.

Sometimes it's just folders or pages that are getting flagged but it's only a matter of time til the whole domain gets flagged.

The reason for getting flagged is the page itself, not the HTML or JS. As you said, it's considered deceptive. I generally have a few domains ready to switch in instantly if one gets flagged. Would suggest you do the same

Cheers.

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Will a sub domain work or do I need to get a new one?

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Subdomains can work for a bit too but at some point the domain will get flagged. Depends what's easier for you:

- buy cheap domains and have them ready to change (plenty of $0.88 domains available, maybe even less).
- create subdomains and change those until the whole domain gets flagged.

Even sub-folders will work for some time. But it's just a matter of time and likely will get flagged faster and faster.

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Ok makes sense. I'll buy about a dozon new domains for backup. I just didn't know that it would get flagged so fast and not even pushing that much volume to it. When spying some of those domains have been running for weeks to months with the same landers. That's why I found it weird my got flagged quickly.

Good to know it wasn't something isolated that I did though

Thanks,

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Well, flagging can be quite random. You never know if it happens on day 1, or on day 100. That's why it's good to have backups prepared when it happens, and not try to predict how often it does.

I tried that, and talked to everyone I knew... There's basically no pattern.

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Is there a way to auto check if your domain is flagged that sends a notice when it happens? I would hate to be sending traffic and not know that the domain is flagged.

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There are ways but so far none of them were great... I can't confirm but there's also the possibility that once you check if your domain has been flagged with some of the services available there, it will get checked more often. Kind of like a trigger that there's a reason it should be flagged.

What works best for me is having it as a recurring task to check manually in the morning and in the evening. During the working day, you can see weird performance usually just as quickly and change if necessary. In the evening, it's good to make sure you don't go to sleep with flagged domains, and in the morning in case they were flagged during the night. Unless you have people paid or yourself are willing to get up for alarms in the night to fix domains, this is a good system.

Furthermore, it's good to spread out your risk a bit by having different domains for different offers/verticals/campaigns/whatever. This helps that if one domain gets flagged, not all your stuff goes down. Same goes for tracking domain.

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I'll have no problem doing that. There's just so much going on sometimes that I want to try and automate things as much as I can.

I'm actually just working with 1 GEO right now and plan on expanding to other traffic networks as popads doesn't have the amount of traffic I want for certain carriers. If I'm setting up a camp on 2 different traffic networks would it be a good idea to have different domains for each?

With the tracking domain. I'm using Voluum and have it pointing to my custom domain "track.nowflaggeddomain.com" do I also need to update this to a new domain?

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Spread spread spread.

Don't have it in such a way that if one domain gets flagged, everything crashes

How you spread depends exactly on what you are running and how you structure your funnels.

We spread domains based on offers, not traffic sources for example.

Your landing page domain should certainly not be the same as your tracking domain. That's just waiting for trouble to happen.

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The things you learn after actually launching a campaign lol. I'm dealing with iPhone sweeps 7 and 6's. I start having different domains for each offer.

Tracking.... ahhh thanks for the heads up. My landers and tracking are under a sub domain. So the landers url was something like "http://lander.iphoneoffers.com" and tracking was http"//tracker.iphoneoffers.com". Instead I need to have a domain all by itself not connected to any of the lander urls correct?

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Yep, definitely have 2 completely unrelated domains for tracking and hosting.

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Will do. Thanks for your time.

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Newbie question:
-which domain gets flagged easier: the domain where your landing pages are or Voluum tracking domain?
Both can use .xyz domains?

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Landing page domain gets flagged most often.

Depending on how you have stuff structured, I'd suggest using .com for tracking. Usually you have fewer tracking domains and if they fail, more campaigns die out. .coms are the ones that get flagged less often, especially if they just do a redirect like trackers do, and don't host anything.

Landing page domains can be something else, like .xyz. We've used .xyz domains but they are not great I think. They can get taken offline without being flagged, directly by the registrar. I suggest other domains that are cheap, like .club, .website.

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Just started another Camp and my domain got flagged within minutes it seems. How is this possible? I thought it was strange how none of my landers were hardly getting any clicks. That's $50 wasted with no data. The domains I'm using are .pw. I CNAME it to my cloudfront with a subdomain. The regualr domain would look something like "http://mydomain.pw". And the CNAME I use for cloud front would be something like "http://sweeps.mydomain.pw.

What the heck am I doing wrong? I find it impossible to launch campaigns like this.

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^^^^ Genius. I've setup rules for carriers but didn't know that you could setup rules for google like that. Learn something new everyday. Do I just redirect them to something like Yahoo's homepage instead?

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Keep in mind that even with all these tricks, domains still get flagged.

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Copied list to notepad.

I have seen some of those names looking through the ISP with my campaigns. Didn't link my domains getting flagged with this ISP until now.

After launching a few terrible failed camps I can see which ISP are common carriers with my GEO. Instead of creating a rule to block google ISP's, would it be better to create a rule that only allows the ISPs I know are good?

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I think keeping the data centers/corporate ISPs blacklisted is better. Whitelisting ISPs is a lot of work and a whitelist doesn't allow anything more to come in.

You can instead update your blacklist.

For most things, I think blacklisting makes more sense than whitelisting. Few situational exceptions.

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Using Voluum how do you globally blacklist these ISP's? I would think creating a rule with those ISP with every campaign would be tedious. The only option I see is a bot blacklist that works globally.

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You can copy/paste a list in a Flow. You create one rule that says if it's one of the blacklisted ISPs, you go to a certain page/domain. And then continue with the rest of your real rules.

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Hi, i have only one domain for hosting landings.

How i know when my domain is flagged? How to check domain ?

Thanks

-Vladimir

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https://www.virustotal.com or google console

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In my tests, this trick gives you more time. But yes, still get the domain banned.

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What il3n1n posted is one way. Another way is to type your landing page url in google. If its flagged the whole page will be red warning you about the site.

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Not quite. I mean http://google.com/webmasters/.
If you register site in google console, they will notify you if you domain already flagged.

There are several banned types.
- flagged only path (folder like http://domain.com/folder/)
- flagged all path
If you use google console, you can see which folder cause alert.
And further, if you pass source/isp/device etc. to LP, you will be able to explore from where the problem came

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Used the ISP trick few months ago, sometimes it worked, sometimes not (still using it to redirect bots/datacenters away), but it's not much helful in case of Google flagging the domain.

The thing is as our visitors use Google Chrome browser they still can monitor all URLs and do whatever analysis they'd like.

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I've just discovered I got blocked by Chrome/FF again. I'm going to try this. Unfortunately, I have set up my campaigns as "Path" and not as "Flow" in Voluum. This means I have to add the ISPs from the list from Manu manually, one-by-one. To make my life easier, I've recorded the steps in a macro recorder for 1 ISP and let the rest be added automatically (per campaign). I'm using TinyTask 1.50 for this, just in case someone else has the same setup and problem.

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Hmmm, you have to add one by one?

I would switch to flows in that case. You need to do it once and then you just duplicate and have them all. Flows are much more powerful than paths.

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i have same issue and i used to change domain names every time i got flagged
but now i have an issue bigger than first one
my hosting provider "beyondhosting" notify me more times that one or more of my domains have been flagged as phishing by google , and these are illegal and against them TOS, and they cannot allow these to be hosted on them networks , and to prevent server suspension i must remove the reported content.
may you tell me which hosting provider do you use with these landing pages ?
Cheers .

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You have to delete the specific content if the hosting providers receives a complaint.

We use Amazon Web Services but that's the same as for you: If we receive a complaint, we delete the reported content.

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Considering the fact that the big security vendors (some of which are listed in Manu's ISP list) are driving their sales through traffic analysis services, most probably this will end up getting even worse. By the end of the day they will need to list some results named "Deceptive/Malicious Websites Blocked:" in order to make sure their customer will renew the subscription.

I wonder how the country you are running a campaign in, will influence on how fast a domain gets flagged. Not sure if it was just a coincidence but it happened that when running campaigns in UK I've got like 4 domains flagged within a few hours.

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We always got flagged from Switzerland for example actually. So the geo certainly has an effect. The more security companies based there, the more often you get flagged. And some companies are probably more interested in going through pop traffic than others.

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I wouldn't block Google Fiber. It's a popular ISP with real users: https://fiber.google.com/about/

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I checked how much traffic came from it and it was quite low at the time, so it was an easy decision to block anything related to Google until anything gets significant traffic. Like I said before, this ISP block doesn't have a significant effect on domain flagging rate.

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Besides the tips here to avoid getting flagged in the first place, an even more important task is to make sure the traffic source doesn't see any flagged URL in one of your camps. That often leads to an auto suspension of the account. That happens with traffic source which are running auto detection = have bots constantly crawling your domain for flags.

I change URLs every 7 days for the user experience part. Further, many flags do result from an flagged offer page which then gets passed through to the sites linking to it directly. So I make sure non of the crawlers sees the real offer I'm running. Or let the traffic source not see your real live URL.

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Yes, connection with already flagged domains is the main reason domains get flagged from what I've seen. Sometimes the offer page BUT even the zone you buy traffic from can sometimes get you flagged, so build good blacklists with bad zones and avoid them.

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Hi,
can someone explain to me how I should operate this on the daily / hourly basis;
let's assume that my domain flagged by google,
and I've prepared other domains to replace the flagged one-
should I replace it in the tracker, manually, or is there an automated way doing this?


Thanks!

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It depends on what tracker you use.

In Binom for example you can set a trigger to check if the domain is flagged by GSB and when it´s flagged it can be switched automatically.

When your tracker doesn´t have such option you have to change the domain manually.

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