Have you ever posted an ad on Craigslist, checked your account panel and found it “live” and yet you don’t see it anywhere in the category nor in the city you posted on. If you don’t see your ad anywhere, then you had just been “ghosted” by Craigslist’s filters.

Craigslist bots and crawlers screen ads and if they see anything in your ad that tells their system it’s a spam and does not contribute anything to the Craigslist community, then your ad is rejected. It can be quite frustrating sometimes, especially if your using Craigslist to promote your online business. It can be quite time consuming to compose your ad and to post it online, only to realize later that it never got published.

How can you avoid ghosting? Craigslist can also ban or delete your ad if it finds that too many ads are being posted out of one IP. This is the reason why for some categories of Craigslist, especially in the Services section, you may be asked to create a user profile that is linked with a phone verified account. This is to make sure that the posting is done by a human, and not being posted by an auto robot, which some posters are now using for multiple postings.

Some had found relief from ghosting by creating multiple email accounts and using proxy servers to create multiple IPs. This has worked for some and had resulted to more traffic and opt-ins to their site.

The best way to avoid being ghosted is still working around the rules of Craigslist. This means posting unique ads every 48 hours only and making sure your ads are not violating Craigslist’s terms of use.