You got your Craigslist IP Blocked? Fear not, thousands of people get their Craigslist IP blocked each day. That’s a lot of people who are banned from posting ads on the platform. Thankfully, there are several ways you can easily bypass that block and continue posting as if nothing had happened.
But before we go into the methods of getting your Craigslist IP unblocked, we need to know why yours was blocked in the first place.
Why Craigslist IP Blocked Your Profile?
There are several reasons why Craigslist would pull such drastic moves, here are a few of them:
- Posted a ton of ads in a short amount of time.
- Sent a lot of connections to Craigslist from one device.
- Posted something shady.
- Tried web scraping Craigslist using a subpar proxy provider.
- Tried posting an ad in another region or city.
All of these things can land you an IP block from Craigslist. Most of the blocks are automated and detected automatically by Craigslist. This is more or less the industry standard.
What to Do If You Get Your Craigslist IP Blocked?
All is not lost though, you can still continue using Craigslist even after your IP is blocked by the website. The easiest way is to simply make a new account and continue posting. However, if you can’t even launch the website on your devices, this means your IP blocked is and a new account won’t help you with that.
There are several ways you can still use Craigslist: https://proxyway.com/best-craigslist-proxies
Use another Wi-Fi Network
You can dodge a Craigslist IP block by using another wireless network. Using another network would make your IP change as well, this means you’ll have full access to the website once again. You can ask your neighbors for Wi-Fi, go to a friend’s place to post or even head to a coffee shop to use their free Wi-Fi. However, this is not possible to do each and every day, especially when you have to post a lot of ads.
Use a Good Proxy
A proxy is a middleman between you and Craigslist. It basically takes all the actions or requests you want to make and sends them to Craigslist on your behalf. This process isn’t limited to just Craigslist though, it can do that for everything you do on the internet as well. As all your requests are going through the proxy server, the IP address Craigslist sees belongs to that server and not your blocked one. This gives you full access to the website without any restrictions.
Types of Proxies
There are several types of proxies out there but we will discuss the two major ones and how they can help you:
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies assign an IP address that belongs to an actual physical device. So it is virtually impossible to detect it and ban it. You will be assigned an IP address that will be unique and hard to mark as a fake one.
Usually, residential proxies come with a pool of IPs so you can even assign different IPs to different accounts. This will be beneficial if you run a dropshipping business and want to post ads in another city or region. All you need to do is select the IP address from that city and Craigslist will think that account is actually in the city. Using a good quality residential proxy is the best way to avoid getting blocked by Craigslist in the future as well.
Datacenter Proxies
A datacenter proxy is usually generated artificially in a datacenter. A single server is capable of having hundreds of IPs without any trouble. This also means that the server’s IP addresses will share a subnetwork. While this isn’t that big of a deal, but it makes datacenter proxies easier to detect and mass banned. Craigslist can potentially do a big IP sweep and find these out and ban them all. So it is better just to use residential proxies when you are trying to avoid an IP block.
Conclusion
Using a free proxy might get you access to Craigslist but it won’t be reliable or secure. Many free proxy providers track your data and can even steal your cookies, which is never a good thing. So using a free proxy is not recommended, especially if you are going to be using login information or making new accounts.
Similarly, if you are planning on using proxies to scrape Craigslist for data, you will be better off using a premium and paid service. This will not only make the data you collect reliable and authentic but also help you avoid IP bans. Hopefully, you won’t be blocked again but even if you do, you’ll have the means to get past that and continue using Craigslist.
