Ranksonic.net is one of the latest referrer spam and ghost traffic URLs you may have noticed 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.org and utilize other domains that forward to the sites such as seo-platform.com. If you notice an increase in ranksonic.net referral traffic do not be alarmed. The fraudulent web traffic is not essentially harmful; However, it can ruin your website’s analytical data.
Ranksonic.net 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.net 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.
Quick Links
- What is Ranksonic.net?
- How to stop Ranksonic.net referral spam in Google Analytics
- How to stop Ranksonic.net referral spam with your htaccess file
What is Ranksonic.net?
Ranksonic.net is an untrustworthy SEO website that utilizes referrer spam tactics to gain attraction. There are many dubious and untrustworthy SEO related websites that do the same thing such as rednise.com and semalt.com. The ranksonic.net domain name is used to hit your website with referral traffic from different locations around the world using traffic bots, computers infected with malicious software, and other blackhat SEO tactics. 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 visit the website.
The downside to unwanted Ranksonic.net 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.net 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 stop Ranksonic.net referral spam in Google Analytics
To block Ranksonic.net referral spam in your Google Analytics account follow the instructions below to create a simple 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.net 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.net and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage.
How to stop Ranksonic.net referral spam with your .htaccess file
To block referrer spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file. This method will not work against ghost traffic that never actually lands on your website.
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ranksonic.net [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ranksonic.net
RewriteRule .* - [F]
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