What You Need to Know About the

Referral Spam Giant

And How You Can Fight

the Good Fight

Semalt.com

vs.

The Internet

You may have noticed some

interesting referral sources in your

acquisition channels in Google

Analytics

After doing some research, we

found out we were not alone in

seeing semalt.com and friends

appear in our analytics. We

realized we had stumbled upon

a referral spam network…

What does semalt.com say?

Semalt.com markets itself as an “SEO Tool” for

Webmasters. They also happen to rank in the

top 20 of Google for keywords like “php

crawler” and “webmaster analytics”.

Webmasters first started to see semalt.com

popping up in their analytics data in late 2013.

What is semalt.com really?

Semalt.com (and friends) is a referral spam

network – a largely outdated “black hat” SEO

practice that was pretty popular 10+ years

ago. This spam giant tends to target small sites

with a lower visitor count. Semalt.com seriously

skews data by inflating things like bounce rate

and time on site.

Referral spam? Gross

But how does Semalt

affect my site?

Semalt’s bots send out

countless requests to your

site’s publicly-available

access log.

These requests are then

logged in your access file,

create an HTML referrer

link, and show up as

referral traffic in Google

Analytics

HTML

What’s the goal of these

referral spam networks?

One of the main goals of

semalt.com may be to

advertise themselves –

they bank on webmasters being curious about the

traffic source and clicking

to their site.

It is suspected that some

of these spam bots don’t

even visit your server, just

target your analytics data

instead.

The big problem here is that Semalt’s bots totally

ignore any robots.txt directives requesting they not

crawl sites. Countless web crawlers are accessing your

site every day. Crawlers like Google and reputable

SEO tools do not show up in your analytics though –

they are careful to run in the background when

gathering information.

An Semalt manager said “bots just

harvest statistics for Semalt and

cause no harm”. Yeah, sure.

Semalt.com is mocking real,

human user behavior. This allows

them to fly under the radar of

Google, Bing, and other spam

police.

This proves Semalt and other referral

spam networks are not as innocent as

they claim to be. The spam police are

on to you…

So how this this

affecting my site? Unfortunately, we still do not know

semalt.com’s end goal. Short-term, these spammy referrals are a thorn in many site

owners’ sides.

Long-term, we have

to question

the possibility of serious implications

to your site.

What we know:

Large numbers of referral requests can

eat up your site’s bandwidth

This can slow your site down on the user

end

A poor user experience on any site is less

than ideal

Google and other search engines take

your valuable site data and metrics into

account when determining visibility

rankings on the SERPs

How this may effect your

site:

Google and other search engines may take

your bounce rate, time on site, pages per

visit, site load time, etc. into account when

establishing rankings

Low engagement signals from a poor user

experience leads to low rankings - this is a

well know fact

Google may associate this skewed data from

semalt.com and other networks with a poor,

low-quality experience – resulting a in

possible drop in visibility

It is important to note that

this is just speculation right

now, as no long-term

damage has been reported

as of yet.

This is why it’s so important to

monitor all of your site’s data

on a regular basis.

The Don’ts:

DO NOT visit semalt.com or any

of their affiliate sites! You don’t

want to add any more fuel to

Semalt’s fire by contributing to

their monthly clicks.

DO NOT plug your site into Semalt’s removal tool – this will

only lead to an influx of referral

spam

DO NOT download anything from semalt.com onto your

computer – you run the risk of

installing malware and

becoming a crawler

Remove from

Google Analytics:We recommend filtering these referral

spam networking from your analytics

data. This will not stop the bots from

accessing your site, but it will get rid of

that inflated data.

You simply need to tell

Google what sites to

exclude when reporting

data

Remove access

from your site:You can block Semalt and all of its

friends from your .htaccess file

This can be done by adding a few lines of

code to the top of the file that outlines what

URLs need to be blocked.

Bots shouldn’t be able to pass this

implementation – this isn’t a surefire fix

though, as new versions of semalt.com’s bots

are discovered every day.

Please note, .htaccess files are complicated

and should only be edited by an experienced

webmaster to avoid any issues

In all, it is clear that Semalt and its affiliates are an evil presence on the internet. Malicious software,

phishing, and spammy tactics are an unfortunate

reality of having an online presence. Though

Semalt may seem scary, it’s really not. It’s only a

matter of time until the truth is uncovered and this

type of behavior is banned from the web.

Nothing can hinder real,

honest organic marketing

efforts.

To learn more, check out our info list

below for some really great articles.

Fight the good fight by reporting

spam networks to Google, tweet and

blog about their impact, and spread

the word.

http://www.incapsula.com/blog/semalt-botnet-spam.html

http://blog.nabble.nl/post/93306955157/semalt-infecting-

computers-to-spam-the-web

http://www.helloseocopywriting.com/9/post/2014/04/who-the-

hell-is-semaltcom-and-how-do-i-block-them.html

http://www.mylocalbusinessonline.co.uk/semalt-referral-spam-

shady-tactics/

http://refugeeks.com/referrer-spam-in-your-analytics/