Later in this post I tell you how to block semalt.com.

I recently notice strange referral traffic from semalt.com.   So a quick investigation, by visiting their site I see that they are some sort of analytics tools. Offering a free sign up for 7 days but no pricing, suspicious or what?

At this point I realised I had been ‘had’, thats exactly what they wanted, me to visit their site, by definition because I’m looking at my analytics I must be interested in analytics, so they have dragged me to their site by dubious marketing.

Worse still, if I just post something about them they are getting more viral publicity. Clever eh!

Except I don’t like their wasteful and deceitful traffic so I block it. And I’ll show you how to block semalt.com referral traffice too.

Simple add this to your .htaccess file

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

 

 

of course I can’t take any responsibility if this stops your site or anything, its up to you to test it, not me. But it works for my sites.

If you want to test semalt.com being blocked, I think you just have to watch your analytics to see if semalt stops getting referred to you.