Domain reputation vs IP reputation
Domain reputation follows the name and travels with it. IP reputation follows the address and resets when you move server.
Domain reputation follows the name. IP reputation follows the address. Both phrases come from email, where a receiving server decides whether to accept your mail, and they behave differently in the one way that matters: moving server changes your IP reputation and does nothing to your domain reputation.
That asymmetry is deliberate. Sender reputation moved from addresses to names precisely because addresses were too easy to abandon. A sender who burns an address can rent another one in an hour. A sender who burns a domain has to burn the brand with it.
| Domain reputation | IP reputation | |
|---|---|---|
| Attached to | the name in the From address | the sending server's address |
| Survives a host move | yes | no |
| Shared with others | no, unless you send from someone else's domain | yes, on shared or pooled sending IPs |
| Repaired by | sending well, for weeks | moving, or waiting |
| Who publishes it | mailbox providers, mostly privately | blocklist operators, mostly publicly |
The other meaning, and which one you want
In search, "domain reputation" is a loose word for how much weight a domain carries, and the metrics that try to measure it are Domain Rating, Domain Authority and OpenPageRank. None of those has anything to do with whether your mail is delivered.
If you arrived here because mail is going to spam, the tools you want are Google Postmaster Tools, your SPF and DMARC records, and a blocklist check. Domduck records the DNS side of that and does not judge deliverability.
What Domduck records
No reputation score of either kind. Domduck records the inputs with dates: the SPF and DMARC records, the mail exchangers, the certificate, the registration date and the rating.
The reason is the same one that applies to a trust score. A single number labelled reputation merges facts from unrelated systems, and the merge is where the meaning gets lost.
Why it matters
The two meanings share a phrase and share almost nothing else. A page that answers the search question with the email answer wastes the reader's time, and a product that promises "domain reputation monitoring" without saying which one is the reason the phrase is now ambiguous.
Domduck means the public record: rating, rank, registration, certificate, DNS and AI crawler policy, each with a date. See domain reputation for the long version.
Related
- 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 trust scoreA domain trust score is any vendor’s own 0 to 100 judgment of whether a domain is trustworthy. There is no standard behind the phrase.
Primary source: Google's Postmaster Tools, one such reputation view