Got Spam Bots?

If you check your Analytics, you may be noticing some referral traffic from a website called semalt.com. If so, then the next course of action was to find out who semalt.com was and lo and behold you found that they were a, or rather claiming to be an SEO company. If you pull up the URL today you will find that it is much more generic now and you have to add your website URL to get started. By the way…. DON’T DO IT.

Let me go back a little.  Several months ago I noticed this referral traffic on my clients’ analytics and didn’t think too much of it at the time thinking it will go away. And, for a while the numbers did decrease, but they were still there. So, I did some research and found that there were other business owners, website developers and search engine marketers who were finding out the same thing. We wanted this “company” (using this term loosely) to stop “referring” traffic to our website(s). Folks have entered their url to stop, have emailed the “company” (notice there isn’t a contact us on the website now, just login or enter url and start now), tweeted, blogged and reached out to many forums.  Semalt.com has some representatives that are on these forums and reply that they aren’t spam (of course) and to complete the url to stop (which isn’t there now).  None of this has worked.

A little bit about spam and security

At this time, this is just spam. Spam, as you know, is something that you don’t want but get anyways, like junk mail, snail mail, email and etc. It isn’t something that is necessarily harmful to your website like a security breach, a hack or the like, but just really irritating.  This may change, but at this time, it is only spam and doesn’t cause a security issue.

How to filter Semalt.com off your analytics

I found several ways to filter out the spam – semalt.com from your analytics and you can find a few of those methods here – remove from analytics or exclude semalt crawler.  I followed these for all of my clients and we shall see if it is able to keep them out, forever.  I have noticed, prior to the filter, that the bots were growing like adding 69.semalt.com, 77.semalt.com and other extensions of semalt.com.  So it is important to use the filter type “that contains” the ISP domain “semalt.com” to be able to pick up all variations.

Another note, there is another spam bot to look for, similar to semalt.com, which have variations of kambasoft.com and I would suggest filtering both. They are both spam referrals or ghost spam since they never even landing on my site.

Another way, but you have to be a coder geek

I haven’t tried this one yet and I typically don’t get deep into code (over my head mostly) for my clients but you can give the advanced method to block semalt.com a try too.  It has to do with adding a snipit of code to your .htaccess file and I have attached some links for that too; Block Semalt or Block Referrer Traffic.

Lastly, I would encourage you to check out your analytics and please, by all means do your due diligence for your website and your clients.  Research this on your own and then do something about it, at least for your clients. Otherwise, you are reporting traffic that simply is.. bogus!

Should you have any questions on the filter, blocking or what the heck I was talking about, I’d love to hear from you. If you are interested in me taking the weight off of your shoulders with me helping you and your business with search engine optimization or maybe even paid advertising on Google/Yahoo!/Bing or social media marketing, please let me know.

~Kristen