How do I find out if my page has been "shadowbanned" or not?

Digital Marketing
#1

“Shadowban” is the term used when Reddit moderators have hidden your content so that only you can see it.

Anyone visiting your page will see a “Page Not Found” error message instead of your actual page content.

So, assuming you want to find out for yourself if this has happened, I’ve put together a list of steps you can take to make sure:

  1. Firstly, check Facebook search results
    Type the URL of any post on your “banned” Reddit thread into Facebook and scroll down to “See More Results.” If nothing comes up in these results, then congratulations - it’s not just an issue with Facebook search (commonly caused by having web address redirects set up). If it does still show up in Facebook search results, then…

  2. Check to see if it’s showing up on Google.com or any other country-specific versions of Google such as Google. i.e. (for Ireland) etc.

Suppose your post is showing up in the “Google Search Results” section for your specific region but not in the regular Google search results. In that case, this confirms that Reddit moderators have shadowbanned your page and have only made it invisible on Reddit - meaning you can still access the content using a direct link to the original thread (if you know what it was called).

  1. If all else fails, just try pasting your URL into a new tab and refreshing it: http://www.reddit.com/r/subreddit/comments_all/. If you can still see your post, then it has been shadowbanned.

Note: This won’t help if the moderators are using a JavaScript-based solution to block your content, but as far as I’m aware, I don’t believe there is an automated way for mods to do this on Reddit without having human oversight (even if they wanted to). It may be possible that these processes can change in the future, but since they need to be implemented manually - at least for now - they are extremely unlikely to happen. So the likelihood of them not finding some loophole and automating their censorship system is pretty much non-existent.