Have you been seeing a large increase of visitors in your analytic control panel lately? Specifically, from the referrer semalt.com or semalt.semalt.com. This new website is most likely skewing your analytic data and painting a pretty ugly picture for your business team. Turns out this is not real traffic i.e. human visitors. It is actually a keyword research program or bot. Seamalt is unethically scrapping through the web via brute force in a strange way to capture more clients.
You see them returned in your analytic control panel and want to know more. So, like most of us you click the link to see what they are all about. This is when you are met with a poorly written website that is selling SEO and key word ranking service that I do not recommend. You may find this review of Semalt very interesting.
Safe to say, you will want to avoid entering your website or any other data here at the semalt website. However, I am sure that you would like to clear them out of your analytic data so that you have less to explain in your marketing meeting when looking at your websites performance. Simply because the crawlers from Semalt will only visit 1 page at a time and send your website bounce rate through the roof.
Here are some simple steps that will clean them out of your analytic data.
First I recommend if you have access to editing the .htaccess file on your webserver to make the adjustment there. The code below will deny access to the Semalt crawler by returning a 403 forbidden page and not grant any further access to Semalt to your website. This is the preferred way to stop the troublesome bot as it will also clean up your Google and other webmaster analytic data.
Here is the code to put into your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* – [F]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ([^.]+)\.semalt\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for-website\.com
RewriteRule .* – [F]
If you don’t have access to editing the .htaccess file on your server there is another way to block this data from your Google Analytic view. I have created a quick video to take you step by step on creating the Analytics filter in Google Analytics Admin section.
For reference the Semalt server IP address is: 217.23.11.15
For reference the Buttons-for-website IP address is: 217.23.8.124
So I hope this will help all my friends in the marketing departments at your next quarterly meeting. Hopefully, you wont have to spend the first hour explaining your way around the noise in your analytic profile. If you still need some help getting this setup TGS Web Design can help you. Just give us a call 505-903-4326.