Rankings-analytics.com is one of the latest URLs that engages in a blackhat SEO tactic known as referrer spam indexing. Referrer spam is a shameless and destructive tactic designed to promote the website spammers want people to visit and to essentially boost the spam URL’s rank in Google search result pages by creating backlinks off your website’s access logs.
Rankings-analytics.com referral traffic is a very big problem for many webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate analytical data. This is because referrer spam can ruin website data measured by Google Analytics and other analytical services. The website data it can affect includes everything provided in the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior sections measured by Google Analytics. For example, rankings-analytics.com referrer spam can junk-up your bounce rate because the spam URL typically lands on a single webpage on your website and leaves your website from the same single webpage. Referrer spam can also hit your website from sources around the world.
Quick Links
- What is rankings-analytics.com?
- How to block rankings-analytics.com referrer spam in Google Analytics
- How to block rankings-analytics.com referrer spam with your htaccess file
- How to block rankings-analytics.com referrer spam with WP Referrer Spam Blocker plugin
What is rankings-analytics.com?
Rankings-analytics.com is a URL that engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website’s analytical data. Rankings-analytics.com referrer spam is designed to produce repeated site requests onto your website at any given time and from around the globe by 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. In this case, rankings-analytics.com adds tracking cookies to your computer and forwards to infamous spammer semalt.com and other webpages.
The downside to unwanted rankings-analytics.com referral traffic and all referrer spam in general 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.
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.
Rankings-analytics.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 rankings-analytics.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 rankings-analytics.com referrer spam in Google Analytics
To block rankings-analytics.com referral spam in Google Analytics follow the instructions below. Blocking rankings-analytics.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 rankings-analytics.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 rankings-analytics.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 rankings-analytics.com and click the Save button on the bottom of the webpage.
How to block rankings-analytics.com referrer spam with your .htaccess file
To block rankings-analytics.com referral spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} rankings-analytics.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} rankings-analytics.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]
How to block rankings-analytics.com referrer spam with WP Referrer Spam Blocker plugin
Botcrawl.com has published a plugin for WordPress website called WP Referrer Spam Blocker. Our free Referrer Spam Blocker plugin for WordPress can be used to automatically block referrer spam URLs.
- Download Referrer Spam Blocker plugin for WordPress.
- Go to Plugins > Add New and click Upload Plugin.
- Click Choose File and select the referrer-spam-blocker.zip file and click Install Now.
Leave a Comment