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SEMALT appears as a referrer for many client websites,  identified as part of our SEO services.

SEMALT is an SEO tool that offers to help understand your Google results. The service provides little information on its website without you first logging in with a Facebook, Linkedin or Windows account.

You may see traffic coming from the referrer semalt.com like this..

However, SEMALT is not a visitor but a bot that is spidering websites.

Traditionally, bots or spiders are used by search engines to crawl your site. These have their own rules and courtesies which include not appearing as visitors so they don’t impact your results or cost you too much bandwidth. SEMALT is racking up daily visitors across multiple IP addresses and companies which just looks spammy even if they claim not to be.

So, you can just ignore it and filter the results from your analytics package or you can actively block this site for visiting. You can do this by editing your .htaccess file.

If you’re not familiar with .htaccess, it is a file that is generally included in your website on web servers that are powered by Apache (most of them are). The file enables you to control visitor behaviour like allowing access and performing redirects.

You can include the following code within your .htaccess which should block SEMALT from future visits.

# block visitors referred from semalt.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Changing your .htaccess file is an advanced task and we don’t recommend doing this if you are unsure. If you do make this change yourself make sure you make a copy of the original .htaccess before you start just so you can put things back if it all goes wrong!

You can reach SEMALT on Twitter @semaltcom. Over the past few weeks their staff have been on Twitter responding to complainers but offering nothing tangible. If you are interested you can export Twitter followers for SEMALT to see who else is being affected!