Comments on: SEMalt is Skewing Your Stats

By: Scott Hendison

Scott Hendison — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 19:09:47 +0000

SEMalt is back – just noticed – 63 visits over the past 30 days

By: David Minton

David Minton — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 15:19:35 +0000

Glad to see I am not the only webbie who went ballistic when they saw this crap in their stats. Kinda like the U2 shit on my iPhone, no real biggie, just a pain, something I didn’t ask for and don’t want……. and MAJOR distraction in my day.

I am thinking to send an invoice to the scammers.

My tab to the uninvited Ukrainians will include:

The time I had to take to track their IP [semalt.com (217.23.11.15) and semalt.semalt.com (217.23.7.144)] Ran a tracert which gave me these yesterday and today, but it looks like they change from time to time, so I’m ready to block all traffic from 217.23 (their Dutch ISP).

Time to research who the f**k they are.

Time to handhold one of my clients, an elderly artist whose low volume website is an underpaid labor of love on my part (treat your legacy clients well, they got ya up and running!!).

Her usual 20 or 30 hits of real visitors a day was indeed significantly skewed, and those visits are very important to HER!!! More to the point it took my patience and time to explain that she had not really had a sudden magic jump in visitors, nor was site in “danger”, and who this flaky robotic visitor was, and what their hidden agenda really was.. the time for this task is still TBD!!!!

This is why webbies get grey!

By: Scott Hendison

Scott Hendison — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 21:29:59 +0000

I didn’t submitted all clients until April 1st or 2nd, and just I spot checked four, with none having any return visits yet… Thanks for the heads up though, Michael, i’ll keep an eye out

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 20:10:02 +0000

In reply to Scott Hendison. I can confirm that URL's submitted to their removal list end up crawled again after a few months. I did a blanket submit of all our clients back in February and Semalt is starting to show up in the stats again for some of them. They are not gaining any points with us or our clients...

By: Scott Hendison

Scott Hendison — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 15:47:26 +0000

In reply to Alena Calambu. Sorry, Alena, that's not something I can help with. It's probably easiest to just go to their site and add your domain to their "do not crawl" list.

By: Alena Calambu

Alena Calambu — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 22:20:11 +0000

How to block semalt in nginx? thx

By: Scott Hendison

Scott Hendison — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 01:35:18 +0000

In reply to Joey A. Agreed. F*ck them ;)

By: Joey A

Joey A — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 19:48:03 +0000

Unless you manage websites for local businesses and Semalt accounts for well over 50% of your monthly traffic. I’ve got one site now where Semalt accounts for 72.25% of the traffic and has a 100% bounce rate – and that’s not counting youtube.downloader and kambasoft which skew the data even further.

Filtering this stuff is a huge pain.

By: Diego Elio Pettenò

Diego Elio Pettenò — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 14:38:21 +0000

You’re definitely not alone, especially in being threatened by their Twitter PR.

https://thenewfr0ntier.blogspot.nl/2014/03/anyone-running-blogger-or-wordpress.html
https://blog.nabble.nl/post/93306955157/semalt-infecting-computers-to-spam-the-web
and my own
https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2014/08/antibiotics-for-the-internet-or-why-blocking-semalt-crawlers

I wish I had read Nabble’s post before writing mine, they are much worse than I made them out to be.

By: Scott Hendison

Scott Hendison — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 13:41:08 +0000

In reply to Nataliya.

Thanks for responding –

You claim that “these robots… don’t cause any harm to the users’ web resources”. I would argue that is false. Merely by using the resources and distorting referrer stats you are causing problems.

You also claim you are “glad to answer all the questions regarding to Semalt” – Well, here’s mine… Why don’t you follow users robots.txt?