Block hongfanji.com referral traffic in Google Analytics

If you noticed a boost in website traffic from hongfanji.com you’re not alone. Hongfanji.com one of the latest URLs that actively engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at the analytical data of websites hosted around the world. Hongfanji.com referrer spam is designed to promote the website they want people to visit and to boost the website’s rank in Google search result pages by creating backlinks off your website’s access logs.

Hongfanji.com referrer spam is a problem for webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate analytical data because it can ruin data measured by Google Analytics and other services. This includes everything covered in the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior portions measured by Google Analytics. For example, hongfanji.com referrer spam can destory your bounce rate because the spam URL only lands on a single webpage and leaves your website from the same webpage. Referrer spam can also hit your website from sources around the world.

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• What is hongfanji.com?
• How to block hongfanji.com referrer spam in Google Analytics
• How to block hongfanji.com referrer spam with your htaccess file

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What is hongfanji.com?

Hongfanji.com is an advanced-fee scam website that actively engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website’s analytical data. Hongfanji.com referrer spam is designed to produce repeated site requests onto your website at any given time and from any global location using traffic bots, computers infected with malicious software, and other blackhat SEO tactics. The benefits that referral spammers have by engaging in referrer spamming is that it will allow them advertise the website they want people to visit and it will improve the spammers search engine ranking by creating backlinks to their website off your website’s access log.

The downside to unwanted hongfanji.com referral traffic is that it can mess up your 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.

Referrer spam is a very questionable tactic used to promote online content. Spammers target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:

• Referrer spammers want to promote a webpage 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 bot and seen as a backlink to the spam site.

Hongfanji.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 hongfanji.com 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.

How to block hongfanji.com referrer spam in Google Analytics

To block hongfanji.com referral spam in Google Analytics follow the instructions below. Blocking hongfanji.com referrer spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter will only mask the spam URL. To block the referrer spam URL at the sources see the instructions below to block hongfanji.com referrer spam using your website’s .htaccess file.

1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab and click All Filters.

2. Click the New Filter button to create a new filter.

3. Add hongfanji.com 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 hongfanji.com and click the Save button on the bottom of the webpage.

How to block hongfanji.com referrer spam with your .htaccess file

To block hongfanji.com referral spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.

## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} hongfanji.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} hongfanji.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]

• Also see: WP Referrer Spam Blocker plugin for WordPress