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Why are my domains being blocked by Smartfilter (owned by Yahoo) at work. I buddy mentioned that he had the issue before. He "categorized" his domain with his registrar, changing it from "Uncategorized". Shortly after it worked.

How can domains be categorized? I look through all the options at my registrar (Go Daddy) without finding one for domain categories.

Any help would be appeciated

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Never heard of domain categorization, it may be a Smartfilter thing (check smartfilter's website and see if they've got a review or change category thing somewhere). – dkuntz2 Jan 12 '11 at 6:00

3 Answers

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"Why are my domains being blocked by Smartfilter"

To put it as simply as possible, smartfilter categorized your site as (for example) "Sports and recreation" your company decided to block all sites in the category "Sports and recreation"

Your site isn't being directly blocked, it just happens to sit in a category your company chooses to block.

To fix this you can either challenge your workplace to unblock that category, or challenge smartfilter that the categorisation is an incorrect one. Without knowing what your website is, or how Smartfilter deals with challenges, I don't know how successful either is likely to be.

You won't be able to this via your own webhost or registrar - if you were allowed to do this it would be wide open to cheating and gaming.

"How can domains be categorized?" From my observational experience categorisation is fairly simple - sites are crawled and if the content matches some keywords in a category it goes in there.

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Talk to your IT department. It might be that they found you going to them a lot and felt it necessary to block them.

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It's not the IT dept. I will try to contact Smartfilter and explorer other options and post an update. – Bundarr Jan 12 '11 at 14:32
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I contacted my hosting provider and explained the situation. While on the phone with them it dawned on me to try to browse to the IP assigned to my domains. Sure enough that was also blocked. My domains are hosted on a shared server using a shared IP. So a site using that IP had been flagged as malicious. So I decided to pay for a dedicated IP (2$ extra a month) and bam, the issue was solved. It had nothing to do with domain categorization.

Goes to show that getting a dedicated IP is worth the small extra cost.

Thanks for helping me out.

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