In posting world, there is common practice of routing the posts through machines located elsewhere, commonly known as ‘proxying’. Proxy is the machine located elsewhere. This type of activity makes it appear that you are posting from ‘proxy’ machine itself.

There are even commercial ‘proxy’ services out there who lend their proxy machines for your activity.

Lot of people use this practice thinking that it would confuse or otherwise make it accept posts and get around the problem of getting blocked.

If you are one of these guys or thinking about buying a proxy service, think again. Increasingly, posting sites such as backpage (http://www.backpage.com) are employing various techniques to find and block people who are coming from proxies. In this Part I of article, I describe one such method posting sites are generally employing.

Welcome to Geo IP.

Geo IP (or Geolocation) is a term for analyzing the ip address and ability to pin point the location where the ip address is coming from . IP address is the code assigned to your computer when you connect to your internet service provider such as local dialup company, aol, people pc, netzero, verizon, cable internet etc. Essentially, its a way to tell where your computer is located at. Where like, the country, region, state, city, longitude, latitude etc.

Far fetched ? Not At All. Here is the sample I ran through a Geo IP software .

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The accuracy of such analysis depends on the database of information available. And deeper (more accurate) analysis costs.

Traffic analysis, of which geo analysis is part of, is big business in advertising, but for different purpose. Companies want to serve up internet advertisements that are local to the person who is browsing their site. Imagine (its already happening) that you visit foxnews or cnn.com and see advertisements about local university, pizza place, movie theater or mortgage institute.

Increasingly, I see the posting sites such as Backpage (http://www.backpage.com) are using Geolocation to analyze and potentially block posts that they think are objectionable. Actually, Backpage blocks posts that are coming from overseas. Not sure if this is happening yet, but imagine posting sites getting your pin point geographic location and block you from posting into different cities than the one you are browsing from, specially the sites that operate on ‘local classifieds’ concept such as backpage, craigslist, kijiji.com etc.

So before you sign up with proxy services that are located overseas (Europe, Asia etc) or planning on hiring someone who promised to post from overseas , ask one question, how do they avoid Geolocation.

More on the proxies, more analysis, tips and tricks in Part II.