“Oh my god! LinkedIn has restricted my profile!” – is a more frequently used phrase than you might think! To keep your LinkedIn profile safe from restriction is quite easy if you know how, but even if that happens, you don’t have to panic. From this article you will learn how to avoid restriction and how to get your profile reinstated in case it gets resctricted.
Linkedin has hundreds of millions of users and many of those are fake profiles. To keep their platform clean and valuable, LinkedIn tries to restict as many suspicious profiles as possible. Most of the restrictions are done by algorythms that detect certain patterns during the registration process and in the registered member’s behavior. These algorythms are quite good, but far from perfect. That is why quite often real people’s profiles also get restricted while some fake profiles not get restricted.
Fun fact: LinkedIn does not remove the restricted fake profiles, they just become invisible and inaccessible. They count as LinkedIn’s registered members, because potentially they could be unblocked any time. This means that millions of LinkedIn’s registered members are actually fake profiles, that is why LinkedIn’s userbase never gets less, it just keeps growing… by fake profiles.
How to know if your profile is restricted?
It’s not always as obvious as you might think, because on LinkedIn there are two kinds of restrictions:
- The hard restriction is when you can’t log in at all, because you see a message that your profile has been restricted.
- The soft restriction is a bit trickier, because LinkedIn lets you log in, but your profile is not visible for the public. If you suspect that LinkedIn might have been restricted your profile, ask a friend/colleague to log in to LinkedIn with their profile and give your profile a visit. If they can’t access your profile, because LinkedIn says that doesn’t exist, then you know, you got the soft restriction.
The three most common reasons why LinkedIn restricted your REAL profile:
- You used a public VPN or Proxy service to access LinkedIn. By itself it would not be a problem, but some other users before you might have violated the terms of use of LinkedIn. Now that you are accessing LinkedIn from the same IP address, LinkedIn thinks that you are associated with the previous malicious users. This might result in a restriction.
How to avoid this?
Simply, don’t use public VPN or Proxy service to access LinkedIn, so you won’t get intro trouble because of other people’s wrongdoings. - You used LinkedIn too fast or too much. It might sounds silly, but it’s true on every social network. They are happy when you are using it, but only until you don’t use it too much and too fast. Not because they are worried that you get addicted, but because they think that you are using some kind of automation software, which is usually not allowed on social media platforms, such as LinkedIn. If you visit too many profiles, you send too many invitations, like too many posts or send too many messages… or too fast, they might restrict your profile, saying that you’ve violated their terms of use.
How to avoid this?
Simply, don’t use automation software to interact with LinkedIn or make sure that the speed and number of your interactions stays under the safe limit. What is the safe limit? That’s the funny part because LinkedIn never published that, people just try to find that out by trial and error. - You were unlucky. Sometimes people’s real LinkedIn profiles gets restricted without any reason. They were using their own internet connection, without any VPN or Proxy, they just registered the profile on LinkedIn, they did not even do anything yet that could have been too much or too fast, yet, LinkedIn restricted their profiles. Yes, unfortunately this can happen, even without any wrongdoing LinkedIn’s super secret defensive algorythms can decide that you profile should be restricted. Let’s just call this an act of an evil artificial intelligence.
How to avoid this?
You can’t avoid this. Even if you do everything by the book, there is always a slight chance that LinkedIn’s algorythms will pick your profile for some unknown reason and restrict it. However, it’s not the end of the world, keep reading to see why…
The fastest way to lift the resctriction from your LinkedIn profile
As you can see, LinkedIn can restrict your profile for several – mostly bugous – reasons. Fortunately, they are also aware that their system is not perfect and they don’t want to lose their users, that is why they allow people to unblock, unban, reinstate or with other words to lift the restriction from their LinkedIn profiles.
When you try to login, but you profile has been restricted by LinkedIn, you see an error message. There is also link, that you could use to contact LinkedIn in case you think the restriction was a mistake. To lift the restriction from your profile, you will need to submit your government issued photo ID or passport, proving that you are a real person and the profile belongs to you.
After submitting your documents a customer representative will reply and unblock your LinkedIn profile. It’s very rare that they don’t unblock someone’s profile, but it can happen. If your profile got banned because of a serious violation of LinkedIn’s terms of use, then they might decide to keep your profile banned, or they can even ban you from registering new profiles on their platform. Again, this only happens when someone did something really nasty – in LinkedIn’s opinion.
As a general rule, whatever you did or didn’t do, don’t tell them. Act like, you have no idea what happened any why did your profile get restricted. Most of the time the customer representatives are just as clueless as you, because the automated algorythms don’t tell why did they pick your profile for restriction, they just did, based on some obscure data bits that didn’t favor you on that day. So don’t tell them that you were using a software to automate LinkedIn, or that you were buying likes or connections, etc. Just ask them politely to reinstate your LinkedIn profile, and they will do it.
If you face a soft resctriction situation when you are able to log in but no one else can see your profile, then contact them using this link: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/solve and tell them what is going on: You can log in, but nobody else can visit your profile. They will sort this out for you, maybe even without asking for your ID, as it’s a soft ban.
Takeaway: Check if your LinkedIn profile is soft or hard restricted. Contact LinkedIn, ask them to remove the restriction from your profile. If needed, attach your government issued ID or passport. Shortly (depending on their work load) your profile should work again.
How to remove resctriction from FAKE profiles on LinkedIn?
Well… let’s just say that you are out of luck, because as you might have read above, to unblock a LinkedIn profile, you need to submit a government issued ID or passport. Unless you photoshop one for the fake profile, you won’t be able to do that. That means, it’s pretty much the end of the line for your restricted fake profile.
How to protect FAKE profiles from restriction on LinkedIn?
As you might have read above, LinkedIN at times restricts even real profiles for no reason, so for fake profiles there is no 100% method that would keep your profile safe. But there are some things that you could do, to lower the chance of restriction:
- Don’t log in to LinkedIn with MULTIPLE PROFILES from the SAME IP address. Use VPN or PROXY service if you have multiple profiles.
- Use PRIVATE proxy or VPN instead of PUBLIC, so the IP addresses that you use won’t be flaged because of others previous wrongdoings on LinkedIn.
- Use RESIDENTIAL IP addresses instead of DATACENTER IP addresses, because it’s a bit weird when a lot of LinkedIn profiles are logging in from datacenters.
- Don’t create or manage MULTIPLE PROFILES from the same computer/browser because LinkedIn can detect that. You can get away with creating one or two extra profiles, but that’s it. Managing more profiles from the same computer is highly unnatural and can trigger LinkedIn’s defensive algorythms. Of course there are special software and settings that let you manage more profiles, but make sure that you know what you are doing.
- Use the fresh profiles for some time. Not because you need to “age them” or “warm them up”, but to see if they are getting banned or not. Before you put a lot of effort in, or spend money on a fake profile, make sure it’s safe. You can do that by using it let’s say for a week. Log in sometimes, like some posts, leave some comments, connect with a few people that would sureply accept your invitations. If your fake profile is not banned after a week, then it might stay like that forever. If it gets banned, then you need to think about what did you do wrong? Was IP address clean, were the cookies, the browser, some privacy settings ok? Also, keep in mind: One or two profiles might go unnoticed, but when you scale, then your profiles might get banned as LinkedIn detects that a lot of people misteriously using the same internet/computer/browser to log in… and they restrict them all.
Takeaway: You can get away with having an extra profile or two. To register and manage more than a couple of fake profiles, you need professional tools and services and even with those you have to be careful to hide your little profile farm from LinkedIn. The more profiles you have, the bigger the change of the algorythms notice your activity and restrict your profiles.
LinkedJetpack’s guarantee for restricted profiles
Since 2016 when we started this business, we’ve helped tens of thousands of people making their LinkedIn profiles and marketing better. We have several returning customers, raving fans who recommend us to their friends and colleagues because we provide safe, reliable and quality service.
But we can’t control our customers’ or LinkedIn’s actions. It’s our customer’s responsibility to keep LinkedIn’s rules. Even if we provide safe services that doesn’t put any profile, post or company page in danger, if the customer violates LinkedIn’s terms of use, then it might have consequences, no matter if the customer purchased our service or not. That is why we only provide our money back guarantee ONLY for REAL profiles that are not restricted by LinkedIn. If your profile is restricted by LinkedIn and you can’t get them remove the ban, that means it was a fake profile or you seriously violated LinkedIn rules. In this case our money back guarantee doesn’t apply.
In case you profile is restricted but you can get the restriction lifted, then our money back guarantee applies, since your profile is real and the restriction was probably because LinkedIn’s defense algorythm misfired, or you violated LinkedIn’s rules in a not serious manned, which can happen to anyone, especially to new, unexperienced members of LinkedIn.
