Having problems with ghosting and wondering if your image ads are causing the problem? Images are a great way to boost traffic and customers to your site, but has Craigslist made changes that affect the chance of your ad ghosting if you use images in your ads? There s no point in using images if your ads ghost most of the time and customers can t find your ads. Luckily, there are a few tricks or ways that you can try to see if the cause of your ads ghosting on Craigslist is image based and if it is what you can do about it.
Ghosting has always been a problem on Craigslist. Craigslist ghosts ads based on a series of complex filters which are in place to stop unwanted ads and spammers. The safest and most reliable kind of ad on Craigslist is a plain text ad without any html code, hyperlinks or images. The problem is that these ads often look boring and dull. Some of the ways Craigslist can detect unwanted or overposting of ads is similar or same ad content/words and also html and images in ads. If you don t keep your ad unique it makes it very easy for Craigslist to detect that same ad if you post it multiple times through the day or even a week. The way to bypass this is to keep your ad as different as possible. Change the wording and layout as much as you can if you plan on posting it several times. If you post with images and find that your ads are ghosting more often than they usually do if you don t use images, try the following tricks to see if you can fix the ghosting problem caused by the images.
Host your image on a different site. There is a chance that Craigslist has blocked the website where you host your images and this is causing your ghosting problem. By putting the image on another site you might find that your image ads once again go live. Never host images on your own personal website. Craigslist is much more likely to block a small, unknown website that is used for image hosting than one of the major websites such as photobucket. If that doesn t fix your ghosting problem, try renaming the image file each time you post the ad. Upload the same file several times to your hosting site with a different filename. Craigslist is always on the lookout for any footprints or signs that someone is posting the same or a similar ad again and again.
Images ads can really help your business on Craigslist but if you find that your ads are ghosting more and more you will need to stop and do a little research. You might find that Craigslist has blocked the domain where you store your images or that they have picked up on the name of the file. Simply change either of these two and see if you can bypass the ghosting problem with Craigslist and get your ad live once more.