How to block toolszap.online referral traffic with .htaccess

ToolsZap (Tools Zap) is a website that provides several online marketing tools including a word tracker, keyword revealer, and site explorer tool that many website owners, webmasters, and online marketers use to keep track of their own websites as well as competitor sites. This may sound great to some website owners; However, many others simply do not want other people including their competitors to spy on them. Luckily, there is a way to stop ToolsZap from crawling your site and block referral traffic from associated toolszap.online, ahrs.toolszap.online, and toolszap.com.

In this guide, we explain how to block toolszap.online referral traffic using your .htaccess file to stop eavesdroppers from viewing data about your website.

How to block toolszap.online with .htaccess

.htaccess is a configuration file used by Apache web servers and .htaccess rules override global settings for the directory in which the file is placed. Most of the time, .htaccess files are created automatically on a server by a web host when content management systems such as WordPress, Magento, and Drupal are installed. In other cases, a .htaccess file can be created and placed in your site’s FTP (WebFTP) or cPanel File Manager.

To locate your website’s .htaccess file, go to the FTP Manager or File Manager. The .htaccess file is typically located in the root directory folder of a specific domain. For example, if WordPress has been installed, the .htaccess file will be located in the same directory as the index.php file and wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes folders. Please note, the .htaccess file may be hidden and it may be required to show hidden files in order to reveal its position on your server.

To edit the .htaccess file, click the file and then click Edit if you are given the option. You may also download the file and edit it from your computing device.

A possible way to block toolszap.online referral traffic through .htaccess is to deny access from the link. The following rule will display a 403 Forbidden error to any user attempting to access your site from toolszap.online:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "toolszap.online" bad_referer
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from ALL
Deny from env=bad_referer

Here’s another more astute way to block the domain. This method will display a 500 Internal Server Error for anyone linking from the target domain:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} toolszap\.online [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* - [F]