Beware of Semalt Referral Traffic

For some time, our clients website analytics have been showing minimal traffic being driven by semalt.com which was not creating any big concern. Even though this type of traffic has been showing up for some time, most likely it wasn't referring a great number of "visitors".  However, during the last half of 2014, Semalt has beefed up its activities and this can now create problems for your website.This is website traffic you don't want.

What is Semalt?

It's bad news. Semalt is a Ukrainian-based spamming operation that uses its "botnet" to hijack hundreds of thousands of computers around the world by hiding within Soundfrost, which is a mp3 download web utility. Without going into the ugly details, just know that Semalt affects your website analytics by "driving" high numbers of bogus referral traffic; however, the traffic will show a 100% Bounce Rate, reduced average session duration times and takes up bandwidth - which can negatively impact your website rating. So what can you do to lower the impact of this spammer? 

Semalt Don'ts

• Don't opt-out of Semalt with any links they provide. Many have reported that once they attempted to opt-out, the more traffic was generated by Semalt. 

• Semalt ignores robots.txt commands so trying to block it with robots.txt won't work. 

Reducing the Impact of Semalt

Fortunately, there are a couple of ways you can fight the Semalt battle:

• Check with your web development team to make sure they have used the required  code for your .htaccess file. to block Semalt traffic.
• If your website is on Wordpress, use the Block Semalt plugin. 
• If website uses PHP, Nabble has a Semalt Blocker.

You've got enough to deal with when it comes to getting and tracking legitimate traffic to your website; use the above recommendations to stop Semalt from driving bad traffic and messing with your analytics.