Semalt.com

[roberthseo]

Hello there,

We were considering using http://semalt.com/ to help with our SEO. I searched for this company name in this forum and I can see there are various people mentioning it is related to spam?

"Other spammers plaguing the web include **semalt.com **(and various subdomains)"

Would appreciate your views please?

[MattAntonino]

They use Google Analytics referrer spam to get noticed. Smart possibly but not exactly a normal behaviour. I wouldn't use them myself.

They're one of the earliest who used this kind of spam to get attention (and backlinks) and it works - but it's not really what most people would consider a "legit" way to obtain customers.

Not sure what they'd do to your own site - that's the biggest problem.

[Kokolo]

Yup, this is spam. If I was you, I would even block measuring the views from this sites in Analytics.

There is a cool post on this subject: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

And not only semalt, you may notice a lot more sites like:

best-seo-offer.com, free-share-buttons.com, www.Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com, buy-cheap-online.info, buttons-for-your-website.com, best-seo-solution.com

... and lot more.

Hope you find this helpful,

[TimHolmes]

Absolutely agree, they bloat your site with spam referrer traffic etc.

I would suggest putting some blocks in your analytics solution of choice to filter out their traffic from your visitor numbers etc, but also add something like the following to your .htaccess to further try and block them.

You could also add the other above mentioned spammy site.

Block Referrer Spam

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.semalt.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ – [F,L]