How to block healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam

Healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam is a growing issue for a lot of webmasters, bloggers, and website owners these days. A lot of people have been noticing traffic from healthtools.aarp.org in Google Analytics.  This is a concern because referral traffic from healthtools.aarp.org can mess up your Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior analytical website data provided by Google Analytics. It can ruin your website’s appropriate bounce rate because the spam URL only lands on a single webpage and leaves from the same webpage. Healthtools.aarp.org referral traffic can also use up a website’s bandwidth and cause confusion for new website owners who don’t know why they’re getting referral traffic from healthtools.aarp.org.

This guide will help you block healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam in Google Analytics and block healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam at the source using your website’s .htaccess file in order to stop receiving healthtools.aarp.org referral traffic.

What is healthtools.aarp.org?

Healthtools.aarp.org is a domain name that engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website analytical data. Healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam is designed to create repeated site requests to the website it lands on. The benefits that referral spammers have with this tactic is that it will help them advertise the website they want people to visit and it will also improve the spammers search engine ranking. The downside is that referrals from healthtools.aarp.org can interfere with Google Analytics data and other metrics, as well as use a website’s bandwidth by creating repeat requests.

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

• Spammers want to promote a specific webpage or program and want webmasters to visit the webpage or search for it online and visit it through Google results pages.
• Spammers want to boost their rank in Google Search and acquire backlinks.

Healthtools.aarp.org 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 healthtools.aarp.org 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 promoted by traffic bots which create ghost hits and never actually land on your website.

There are multiple websites associated with this spam URL and if you visit the URL it may redirect you to another webpage such as darodar.com.

How to block healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam in Google Analytics

To block healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam in Google Analytics follow the instructions below. Blocking healthtools.aarp.org 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 please see the instructions below to block healthtools.aarp.org 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 healthtools.aarp.org 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 healthtools.aarp.org and click the Save button on the bottom of the webpage.

How to block healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam using your .htaccess file

To block healthtools.aarp.org referrer spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.

## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} healthtools.aarp.org [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

• Also see: How to block referrer spam