Tracking domain started throwing a red interstitial overnight — what is everyone running on now

Woke up to a tracking domain serving a browser warning instead of redirecting. Two years old, never used for anything but redirects, no content on it at all.

Caveat before anyone asks: nothing changed. No new offer, no new source, same three campaigns as March.

1. Traffic through it dropped about 80% overnight, which is the part that costs money today. 2) The domain itself is fine at the registrar, this is a browser and a couple of resolvers, not a suspension. 3) I have submitted a review and I expect that to take a week and go nowhere, because it always does.

What I want is not sympathy, it is what people moved to. Straight replacement domain and start again, subdomain off something with history, or has anyone actually got a rotation set up that survives this?

two years on one tracking domain. you got a good run mate

FWIW the failure mode you want to design for isn't "domain gets flagged", it's "domain gets flagged at 3am on a Saturday and nobody notices until Monday". You've just had the cheap version of it.

What I run, and it is not clever:

• Three tracking domains live at all times, all pointed at the same box, all in rotation at roughly 60/30/10.
• A cron that fetches each one every ten minutes through a residential exit and alerts if the response isn't a 302 with the right Location header. Not a ping. A ping tells you the server is up, which is not the thing that broke here.

One thing I don't have a good answer on: whether keeping all three on the same box and the same ASN means they all go together eventually. They haven't yet. That may be luck.

They will go together eventually, and the ASN isn't the part that links them. Depends what you're running, but the usual link is the registrar account and the nameserver pair.

If three domains share a nameserver set that serves nothing else, that set is a fingerprint. Cheap fix: different registrars, different NS, and don't buy them on the same day with the same card. Costs you an hour once.

On the replacement question - and I'll say up front I sell these, it's in my signature, buy from anyone you like - a two-year-old domain with no content and nothing but redirects on it is not meaningfully safer than a fresh one for this specific purpose. Age helps you with search. It does not help you with a reputation service that is looking at what the domain does, and what it does is 302 people to affiliate offers. Don't overpay for age here. Overpay for age on a money site.

What I'd actually spend on is having four of them dormant and warm rather than one perfect one.

Everyone is answering the rotation question. Nobody has asked how it got flagged, and you should want to know, because rotating into the same failure buys you a quarter.

The realistic candidates: a competitor reported it, an ad platform's crawler followed the chain, a security extension on a real user's browser submitted it, or your landing page picked up something further down the funnel and the redirect got tainted by association.

Only the last one is yours to fix and it's the one people never check. Follow your own chain end to end from a clean device on a residential line, in the geo you actually run, and look at what the final page loads. Third-party pixels, chat widgets, whatever the advertiser added last month without telling you.

Your domain is often flagged for what somebody else put two hops downstream of it.

This is true and happen to me in January. Advertiser add new widget on thank you page, two weeks later my redirect domain is dirty. I never touch anything.

Anyway they do not tell you and they do not care.

same thing on mine in january, never found out why

same here last week, mine came back after 9 days

nullroute's point was the useful one and it took me an afternoon to confirm.

Ran the full chain from a clean phone on mobile data in two of my geos. The offer page is loading a script from a domain I have never heard of, added at some point in March, which the advertiser confirmed when I asked is a "conversion enrichment partner" they onboarded last quarter.

So my domain is dirty because of a vendor decision made by a company I do not have a contract with.

I have moved to two new domains on different registrars, weighted 70/30, and I am keeping the old one parked rather than retiring it in case the review comes back. But I want to be honest that I have not fixed anything. I have moved the same funnel onto clean names and the thing that dirtied the last one is still sitting in it.

so you're on a clock. at least you know what time it is now