How to Avoid Ban By Sina Weibo

In our last blog post, we introduced some practical methods to unfreeze Sina Weibo. These methods should be used once Sina Weibo detects some abnormal or unwanted behavior in your account. It is usual that if Sina believes these abnormal or unwanted activities are harmful to their micro-blogging system, it may freeze, suspend or ban your Weibo account right away. However, since this micro-blogging platform never discloses in details what kind of abnormal or unwanted activities are not allowed, we therefore would want sharing here some of our real experience we have learnt on how to avoid ban by Sina Weibo security filtering system.

How to Avoid Ban From Sina Weibo

In western world, ban by Google is a very bad news for all internet marketers. In mainland China, Google is nothing but ban by Sina can be a nightmare. Other than those standard account safety precautions, there are some hidden secrets on how to keep your Sina Weibo account alive (not frozen, suspended or banned). These secrets are learnt from our real daily usage experience, as follows:

(i) Avoid Switching Login IP Address.

Do avoid switching different IP addresses when you login your Sina Weibo account. It appears that the system monitors every login IP address and if it sees special or abnormal login activities there, especially if you change to login via overseas proxy server, it will freeze, suspend or ban your account right away once it suspects your IP address might encounter abnormal behavior that should violate its security checking rules. Even you can unfreeze your Weibo later (by our proposed Sina Weibo unfreezing methods), Sina may still suggest you to upgrade your account security protection level via mobile phone SMS message verification, claiming this can reduce potential risk that someone else may steal your account.

(ii) Never Make Comments on Unknown Weibo.

Avoid making comments on other Sina Weibo accounts that you do not know about. You never know which of these unknown accounts are suddenly banned by Sina filtering system, and this will affect your own account too. You will easily get suspended or banned if any one of these unknown accounts are not welcomed by this micro-blogging platform.

There are many games in Weibo that encourage you to contribute and earn prices (gifts or any rewards) by forwarding some posts or making some short comments on other accounts. Even some of these games are recommended by Sina Weibo platform itself, never take risk to play these games if you do not want to risk losing your account. Many users have reported that they lost their Weibo just because they took part in these Sina-recommended games by forwarding too many posts or making too many comments on different unknown accounts. It was possible that these unknown accounts might have invited too many forwarded posts (or spamming comments) suddenly and then triggered red flag by Sina. So when they got banned, many other innocent users who had forwarded their posts or made comments on their posts during that period were considered as part of the red flag. Sina anti-spam system might just try to stop these spams from spreading out continuously and so it might freeze all related accounts in a batch automatically.

(iii) Limit the Number of Applications.

This is a new technique that we have recently learnt. Normally every Weibo should have a number of apps (applications) being used, depending on the interests of that particular user. It is learnt that if an account has used too many applications and Sina suspects any one of these applications as spam, then your Weibo will be at risk. Since you never know which of these applications are suddenly banned by this micro-blogging system, it is wise to keep only a small number of trustable applications in your account.

This special technique is not invented by us. In fact, Sina Weibo is also suggesting that the same idea in its security information centre. This technique is quite unique for Sina, because another key mico-blogging platform in mainland China, Tencent Weibo, does not seem to have such kind of limitation.

Based on our own experience, it is recommended to keep no more than 10 active applications in each Weibo account. If you find you have more than 10, you should deactivate some of the not-fully-trusted applications to make it less than 10.

Above are just 3 top secretive methods to avoid ban by Sina Weibo. Of course, Sina security filtering rules in mainland China are changing all the time, so if you have any other good suggestions to avoid account banning, please kindly share with us. You may leave any valuable comment(s) in below section so that every reader who has visited this page can learn from your useful experience. Thanks so much in advance.