Evil Spam Bot Ruins Analytics

I was checking my Google Analytics numbers. I noticed a very high bounce rate and a ton of visits from seamalt.seamalt.com. I have no idea who that is or why they are visiting my site 38 times a day. I turned to Google for answers. Turns out an evil bot is probing my site and not even buying us dinner.

Seamalt is an Ukranian SEO company with an obnoxious search bot, pinging sites, blowing up analytics and ruining your analytics data to try to drum up customers. It’s spammy, it’s gross, it targets WordPress sites and I want it out of my numbers. You should too. If you want to get rid of Seamalt you have several options. I will be doing this for all of my current and future clients.

To Remove Seamalt:

#1- Go to the Source. You can go directly to the company site for removal. The Ukraine is not known for great regulation and this could just get you in deeper but I gave it a try to test it. They actually apologize for totally mucking up your analytics. The Google forum I checked for this has many dire warnings. Here’s the link:

http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php

#2- Go to Google Analytics. You can just exclude the referrer via Google Analytics. If you want to use other 3^rd party analytics services or plug-ins this could crop up again but most folks stay with Google. Here’s how to eliminate a referrer:

Add or remove referral traffic sources

This setting is controlled applied in the admin settings of each property in your account. To exclude traffic from specific domains as referral traffic:

Any hostname that contains the string you add will be excluded. For example, if you add example.com to the list of referral exclusions, another-example.com will also be excluded from your referral traffic.

1. Navigate to a property. If you’re not in the settings screen, click Admin.
2. Click Tracking Info then Referral Exclusion List.
3. Enter the Domain.
4. Click Apply to save.

You can also remove domains from the list of exclusions, reintroducing that traffic as a referring source in your reports, by following these steps.

#3- Edit Your .htaccess file. This is a great way to get rid of this problem forever! I would recommend doing this when you are creating the site and simply edit the .htaccess file when editing your config.php file for installation. Evil Spam BEGONE!!

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