Domain reputation
Domain reputation means two different things: whether your mail gets delivered, and how much weight your domain carries in search.
Domain reputation means two different things, and search has already picked one of them. The phrase belongs to email deliverability, where a domain reputation decides whether your mail reaches an inbox. The other meaning, the one this product uses, is the public record for a domain and what it says over time.
Both meanings are legitimate and they share almost nothing. The results page for "domain reputation checker" is Spamhaus, IPVoid, EasyDMARC, Valimail and Google Postmaster, with no SEO tool anywhere on it. That is not a gap in the market. It is the market telling you which meaning it holds.
If you meant email
You want Google Postmaster Tools, your SPF and DMARC records, and a blocklist check. The distinction between a name and an address is the important one, and domain reputation vs IP reputation covers it: reputation attached to a domain follows you when you change server, and reputation attached to an IP address does not.
Domduck records the DNS side of that setup, and it does not judge deliverability.
If you meant the public record
Then reputation is not a score. It is a set of facts anyone can check, each one with a date:
- Authority. Domain Rating, and the other scores beside it.
- Identity. Registration date, registrar and status codes, from RDAP.
- Infrastructure. The certificate, who issued it, when it expires, and the DNS records.
- Popularity. The rank, which is a position rather than a visitor count.
- AI access. Which crawlers the site lets in, and since when.
Why Domduck does not publish a single score
A composite hides its reason. "Reputation 42" cannot be argued with, cannot be reproduced, and changes whenever the weights are retuned. A registration date and an issuer name can be checked by anybody and still mean the same thing in five years.
The same argument covers a trust score. If you need a verdict for an automated decision, build it from the fields and write down your own weights, so at least the weights are yours.
The one thing a score cannot give you
A date. Every fact above is stored as a dated row, so the question is never only "what is it now" but "when did it change, and what changed with it". A certificate issuer that changed on the same day the nameservers changed is a migration. Either one alone is a maintenance note.
That is the whole product, and how Domduck reads a domain explains the mechanics.
Terms in this guide
- Certificate TransparencyCertificate Transparency is a set of public append-only logs recording every certificate a trusted authority issues, so misissuance can be found.
- DNS recordsDNS records are the entries that map a domain to addresses and services: A and AAAA for hosts, MX for mail, NS for the authoritative servers.
- Domain reputation vs IP reputationDomain reputation follows the name and travels with it. IP reputation follows the address and resets when you move server.
- SAN certificateA SAN certificate lists every hostname it covers in its Subject Alternative Name field, which is the only field browsers still read for name matching.
- SSL certificate expiryA certificate expires at a fixed timestamp written inside it. After that moment every browser and every client refuses the connection.
- TLS certificateA TLS certificate is the signed file a site presents to prove it owns its name, naming the domains it covers and the dates it is valid between.
Related
- Domain RatingDomain Rating is Ahrefs’ 0 to 100 score for the strength of a domain’s backlink profile. It is logarithmic, relative, and it is not a Google metric.
- Domain ageDomain age is the time since a domain was first registered, read from the public registration record rather than from when the site went live.
Primary source: Google's Postmaster Tools