Launching on Reddit without getting removed
What Reddit's own rules say about self-promotion, what AutoModerator checks before a human sees your post, and the first four weeks of a presence that lasts.
Almost nothing on Reddit is removed for being promotional in the abstract. It is removed for breaking a rule that is written down — usually one you could have read in advance, in a sidebar, in an automod configuration, or on Reddit's own self-promotion page. This is what those rules actually say, and what we do about them in the first four weeks of a launch.
The sentence Reddit opens that page with is the whole brief, and it is worth reading twice:
It's perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not okay to be a website with a reddit account.
What Reddit itself says, in its own words
Two documents matter, and they are not the same thing.
The enforceable one is the Reddit Rules, the sitewide content policy. Rule 2 is the one a launch runs into: "Participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest, and do not spam or engage in disruptive behaviors (including content manipulation) that interfere with Reddit communities." Rule 5 covers undisclosed marketing accounts: "do not intentionally mislead others or impersonate an individual or entity in a deceptive manner."
The advisory one is Reddit's self-promotion wiki, which is where the famous ratio lives. Its actual wording is softer and more specific than the version repeated in marketing posts: "a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content". It is a rule of thumb on a wiki page, not one of the eight numbered rules. The phrase "9:1" does not appear on it at all.
Take the guidance seriously anyway, because the line underneath it is the one moderators actually apply: "We're not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit."
One correction while we are here. Reddiquette is retired. The old wiki page now says only "This page is no longer updated" and points at the help centre, so any advice built on quoting reddiquette is advice built on a page Reddit has taken down.
The four things that get a launch removed
- A ratio that reads as a feed. An account whose submissions are nine parts your domain and one part everything else looks like a feed however good the posts are.
- An automod gate the account cannot pass. Account age, karma, and sometimes karma in that subreddit — checked before a human sees the post.
- A domain with a history. Reddit tells you to check
reddit.com/domain/yourdomain.comyourself. A previous agency's campaign can already have put your domain in a bad place. - The wrong post type. A link post where the subreddit wants a text post, or the reverse, is removed by rule and reads as not having looked.
The domain rules, which are the expensive ones
Account bans are recoverable. Domain bans are not, and Reddit's self-promotion page is explicit about what causes them:
- "Only submitting on, or voting on, one particular person, domain, or brand's content will get an account banned from reddit - it's called vote cheating and manipulation."
- "If all of your employees or contributors vote on all of your links, their accounts and possibly your domain will be banned."
- "You should not ask for votes on reddit, even on your twitter or blog or forum - it will get your account banned, and in extreme cases can get your domain banned."
- "You may never offer money or compensation to anyone to promote anything on reddit for you."
That last one deserves its own paragraph, because it is the rule that decides what a Reddit engagement can be. Whatever is sold to you as "paid Reddit placement" is against Reddit's published rules, and the cost of being caught lands on your domain rather than on the person you paid. Reddit sells advertising; that is the paid channel, and it is clearly labelled as one. Everything else is participation.
A fifth one catches teams that think they have found the loophole: running your own subreddit as a link dump. "If you run a subreddit that is only your own content or your own links, that's not okay and seen as linkfarming or using reddit for SEO."
AutoModerator, which is what you are really up against
Most removals in the first weeks are automatic. AutoModerator's documentation is public, and the checks a subreddit can gate on are a short list: comment_karma, post_karma, combined_karma, the same three again scoped to that subreddit (comment_subreddit_karma and friends), and account_age.
Three details change how you plan:
- 1Subreddit-scoped karma is a separate check. An account with 50,000 sitewide karma and none in the room it is posting in fails a
combined_subreddit_karmagate. This is the mechanism behind "you need karma in this sub", and it is why a credible general-purpose account is not a shortcut. - 2Age is measured in whatever unit the moderators chose — the docs support minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years — so "my account is old enough" is a guess until you have read the config.
- 3By default every threshold must be satisfied at once.
satisfy_any_thresholddefaults to false, so a rule with an age floor and a karma floor means both, not either.
Subreddits that publish their automod config make this a reading exercise. Where they do not, the removal message usually names the rule, which is the same information arriving later.
The first four weeks
- 1Week one — read. Pick three subreddits. Read every top post of the last month and the sidebar rules twice. Note the recurring commenters; those are the people whose replies decide whether a thread lives.
- 2Week two — reply only. No links, no mention of the product. The goal is an account with a history in that room, and a karma balance that clears the gates in step four.
- 3Week three — one text post. Something useful that does not need your product to be true. If it does need your product to be true, it is an ad, and the room will say so.
- 4Week four — read the response and adjust. If it was removed, the rule you broke is usually in the removal message. If it was ignored, the subreddit was wrong or the post was, and those are different fixes.
Identify yourself when you do post. Reddit's own advice is to say it plainly: "Hi, I'm the author of this article, and I can answer the question you have about that." Disclosure costs you nothing with an audience that would have worked it out in one click.
What we do differently
We do not start this clock when a client signs. Every post comes from an account that was in the community before the client hired us, which is the difference between a four-week warm-up and a four-month one — and it is the part that cannot be bought later.
We read the current rules and the automod configuration before every post rather than once per campaign, because both change without notice. And if a moderator removes a post inside twelve hours anyway, we re-publish it elsewhere at no charge; that guarantee is in the shop listing.
How we measure any of this is a separate problem, because a subreddit thread rarely shows up in your analytics at all.