How to Block Semalt Spam Bot Referrer Views From Htaccess

Semalt is an auto seo tool. They tell they are the webmaster analytics. I have gotten some emails from my subscribers, they were telling that they’ve canceled their semalt account but till now their google analytics count viewers referring from semalt.semalt.com. This is may be not only my subscriber’s problem but everyone’s problem who have used semalt. So in this article you will be able to know about how to block semalt spam bot referrer views from the root of your website.

What the problem with these referring viewers

It is good to get traffic from a referrer but what is the problem with this traffic that people want to block it?

Actually, Semalt has created a bot that can do both defining and taking action. First of all, the job of this bot is to find the HTML site with weak security. Once it gets the sites it needs, it starts attacking.

It sends traffic from the attacked sites using semalt.com as a referrer to the link which needs seo boosting. Since it uses publicly viewable logs so it looks like real traffic and google analytics counts these viewers as real traffic too but originally these are bot traffic.

The problem is these traffic come to your website and goes out immediately. As a result your bounce rate is 100%. So you are getting traffic but with this you are getting a high bounce rate too. So everyone who has used Semalt wants to block this traffic and should do it.

How to block semalt spam bot referrer views

There are several methods to block Smalt spam referrer traffic. People apply the method according to their comfort zone. The impact is also different according to the methods. So I will talk about all the methods and their impacts so that you can understand if you should go out of your comfort zone.

Request a crawl removal to semalt.com

Semalt promise that if you romove your site from semalt’s seed list they will never crawl your site. But some people have told they’ve removed their site from semalt but till now they are seeing semalt.com as their referrer.

Block semalt from google analytics

In this case you can add a filter in your google analytics admin panel which will block all the traffic from your selected referrer.

1. Go to your analytics admin panel click on the “view setting” from view section.

2. Go to your analytics admin panel click on the “view setting” from view section.

3. Now you have to filter the host name which you want to block. To found the host name go to reporting from the header menu. Then from left side menu audience > technology > network. Now click on the host name, you will see your host names. Pick your desired host name.

4. Now you have to filter the host name. For that go filter from view section.

5. Click on add filter

6. Give filter name

7. Select filter type as “include”

8. Select field as host name

9. Verify filter

done

Impact

This filter will block your referrer from analytics but originally your site will be being visited by the semalt crawler. Just analytics will block it and show results without the views referring by filtered host.

Block semalt from htaccess

If you want to block this referrer spam traffic from the root of your website then you have to edit your htaccess file. You have to add some codes. I have seen many people use many types of codes. I'm giving you some codes those people have been able to use to block semalt referrer traffic.

This is an updated code of 2016 which is used to block several referrers. You can include more referrer or exclude referrer from here in the code.

My friend Mr-B said that he had tried all the methods but didn’t work but after he found such a code that works. I am giving this code too but note that it works only on apache 2.4.

Here’s another code by which you can block all over the host belongs to spam bot traffic list.

I gave a code to my email subscribers. They replayed me it worked. Here is the code

Try one of these codes and if it doesn't work, use another one. I think the codes here can solve your problem. By this method you will be able to prevent the bot from visiting your site anyway.

Last word

My personal experience says that no other serious marketers should use any kind of auto seo. Initially it may seems like it's working great, a lot of visitors are coming to your site. But in the near future the destruction of your site is bound to come closer. Auto seo is an unnatural approach that not only Google but also other search engines dislike.

Those who lack patience try to do hard only they use the service like auto seo. But the truth is that the key to success is to be patient and work hard. There is no such thing as a shortcut. So do seo naturally. Give your site time to rank. The result will be tremendous. Believe me I am telling the deep truth.