Download - Semalt.com vs. The Internet
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network – a largely outdated “black hat” SEO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/