Hi all,
Please advise whereabouts in your Analytics does it show up that they are crawling your site.
I got here because I was looking at my Real Time Overview in Analytics and noticed their website URL. Hopefully it was the first time that they were visiting.
I have now added the code into my .htaccess file that is on the initial post here.
Is that all we have to do or is there an updated one?
Thanks
Steve
Hi all, I also have the problem of semalt.com referrer spam showing up in Google Analytics Referral Sources reports. This is bad news for me because I need to share that report with a client and bogus referrals are unhelpful at best.
At first I applied the solution described earlier in this thread and I promptly got a bunch of referrer spam from random semalt subdomains (like 22.semalt.com, 49.semalt.com etc) over the next few days. An .htaccess rule that blocks all subdomains of a referrer spammer’s domain is what we need here. After some searching, I added this to my .htaccess file:
# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (\.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses)\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule . – [F]
No referral spam all day since doing this. Here is my whole .htaccess file contents:
___
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (\.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses)\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule . – [F]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
___
I’ll report back if this stops working or if I notice any bad side effects. This solution was originally posted on stackexchange and you can see that thread here.
D_dubya – Is this still working for you?
I manage a site for work and have been getting hit relentlessly by semalt, and now kambasoft and savetubevideo. Was wondering if this was a legit fix to this issue or if they’ve already found a way around it, which seems to be the theme when it comes to semalt.
I haven’t had any Semalt referral spam since I made this change a couple of days ago. Actually, everything on my Analytics referral report now looks like a legitimate referral. I wasn’t getting Kambasoft, but I’m happy that all the Semalt variants are gone.
I noticed that the link where I poached this code has been edited for some reason, but I’m still happy with the solution. The same solution (for Kambasoft only) is posted here with a bit more explanation.
