Question on Google analytics

[KJDMedia]

Hi everyone, I hope you can help me: I use Google analytics to pair results from moz with the results on analytics. I came across a section call SEM MELT on analytics does anyone know what this is and can you please explain it to me.

Thanks.

[Linda-Vassily]

I have never seen that. Exactly where in Google Analytics did you see it?

[DavidKonigsberg]

its a famous spider that tracks serp info - read more here http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-semalt

[CommT]

Hi Matty,

I've never seen that, but SEMALT shows up in my referral traffic report. It's a bot and very annoying. My devs have tried to block it, and it worked for a while but I noticed today that they are still getting in with 24.semalt.com, 25.semalt.com etc etc etc.

Amelia

[danatanseo]

What Semalt is doing is also known as "referral spam." Here is more information from the Google Product Forums, including how to block Semalt...however, don't go to Semalt's site and try to do it with their tool, block them via your .htaccess file

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/VdmF4xDYnDE

My favorite line is "The company is engaged in old school stupid customer acquisition techniques (referrer spam).  As to their links from their site, they belong to a class of links that I call fungus (automated crap).  As to the referrer traffic, it is crap traffic that is meaningless to you.  If you can isolate the IP addresses used by the company, block them via .htaccess (but beware that they may spoof their IP address and you don't want to block a legitimate IP range)"

The thread contains instructions for adding code to your .htaccess file that will block them. Hope that helps!