Block ranksonic.com referral spam in Google Analytics
Ranksonic.com is a domain named associated with referrer spam and ghost traffic. You may have noticed unwanted referral traffic from RankSonic websites in your Google Analytics data. RankSonic is no stranger to referrer spam, they engage in the referrer spamming tactic with many similar domain names such as ranksonic.net, ranksonic.org, ranksonic.info, and ranksonic.biz and they utilize other domains that forward to the spam sites such as the domain name seo-platform.com. If you notice an increase in ranksonic.com referral traffic do not be alarmed. The fraudulent web traffic is not essentially harmful; However, it can ruin your website’s analytical data.
Ranksonic.com referrer spam and referrer spam in general from other URLs like copyrightclaims.org and many more is a growing problem for many webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate and true analytical data. Referrer spam can ruin website data measured by Google Analytics. The website data it can affect includes everything measured in the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior areas by Google Analytics. For example, ranksonic.com referrer spam can destroy your bounce rate because the spam URL typically only lands on a single webpage on your website and leaves your website from the same webpage. Referrer spam can also hit your website from sources around the world, from various resources, and more.
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What is Ranksonic.com?
Ranksonic.com is a very questionable SEO website with a bad online reputation that utilizes referrer spam tactics in order to acquire website traffic. There are many dubious and untrustworthy SEO related websites that do the same thing such as rednise.com and semalt.com. The ranksonic.com domain name is used to make it look like referral traffic hit your website from different locations around the world. Referrer spam uses traffic bots, computers infected with malicious software, and other blackhat SEO tactics in order to create disruptive web traffic. Most of the time the traffic will not actually land on your website but will only appear in your Google Analytics data. The benefits that spammers have by engaging in referrer spamming is that it will allow them advertise the website; by possibly creating backlinks to their website off your website’s access log or getting you and other people to notice the referral traffic which makes you curious enough to visit the spam website.
The downside to unwanted Ranksonic.com referral traffic for website owners is that it can mess up the appropriate Google Analytics data and other website metrics provided by third-party services. In some cases it can also use up your website’s bandwidth by creating repeated site requests. However, this is not the case with this URL since it primarily generates ghost hits that do not actually land on your website.
Spammers target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:
- Referrer spammers want to promote a website and want you to visit the webpage or search for it online through Google search engine results pages.
- Referrer spammers want to boost their rank on Google search engine results pages by creating backlinks. They do this by logging requests into your website’s access log, which is then crawled by Google’s indexing bots and seen as a backlink to the spam site.
Ranksonic.com referrer spam is not entirely dangerous to your website. It will most likely not cause any trouble with how your website is accessed by your visitors or ranked by Google. However, in some cases referrer spam may use up your website’s bandwidth and CPU by creating multiple site requests to your website. In other cases, the spam URL is served to your analytical data by traffic bots which create ghost hits and never actually land on your website, which happens to be the case with this URL. They often target your GA ID number.
How to block Ranksonic.com referral spam in Google Analytics
This guide will help you block ranksonic.com referral traffic and RankSonic spam websites in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab and click All Filters.
2. Click the ADD FILTER button to create a new exclude filter.
3. Add Ranksonic.com or the URL or something you can remember as the Filter Name.
4. Select the Custom Filter Type.
5. In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source in the list. In the Filter Pattern text box, add ranksonic.com and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage. To add all RankSonic urls use Filter Pattern: ranksonic.com | ranksonic.net | ranksonic.info | ranksonic.biz