block referrers/semalt.com

[liquidvisual6061]

Getting a lot of referral hits from dubious sources in Brazil, Peru etc and especially from a semalt.com. Anyway to block these from showing up, as they skew the legitimate hits??

[TheBCMan · Accepted solution]

In BC no, if you use google analytics and use filters you could pull it off.

[matthewk182]

Yeah the FREE service can do it but the PREMIUM service can't, but so what? GA only hides the data from reports. It doesn't block it from the site. Thats no help with bounce rate and it's a waste of bandwidth.

It probably won't make a dent in sites that receive huge amounts of traffic, but for small businesses it renders BC useless compared to it's main competition.

[KazapME]

I just did a Live Chat with Adobe "support" with that very question and got zero help. I was told that this was a "SEO problem"!!! I ended up just researching and it looks like I will be creating a robots.txt file to place on the server myself and then (fingers-crossed), see if it does any good since "Customer service" had no idea how to help me. The Web Robots Pages

[BrandKits]

I've just come across this problem also, and after a lot of research found it's affecting millions of site owners, and it's screwing up all my site's Analytics.

I am about to apply GA filters on ALL my sites for these domains, but it would be a much better method for BC to block at the server level (or  allows access to .htaccess file).

These are the dodgy domains (spaces added).

semalt .com

buttons-for-website .com

make-money-online.7makemoneyonline .com

forum.topic48225684.darodar .com

prodvigator .ua

sponsoredlinx .com

makingmoneycontent .com

[TheBCMan]

They might be perfectly legit sites to someone else, you're more than welcome to spend time trying to block these sites, but in my professional opinion unless they are sending 1000's of hits your way this is "normal" of the internet. You will get random traffic and proxy's and caches and all sorts of things all the time and you're just wasting time and money trying to block them.

[BrandKits]

@TheBCMan.... it's definietly not normal referral traffic. These same sites are appearing in the vast majority of my client sites, who are all in very different industries. They all appear when Semalt appears. I believe it is part of Semalt's black-hat practices.

[matthewk182]

No.. just no...

[DanBho]

The fact of the matter is, BC is expensive, and we deserve feature that allow us to preform simple functions like this. I shouldn't have to create GA filters every time this starts happening. I am sick of getting chewed out by my clients because their bounce rate is climbing due to these spam bots. We either need access to the htaccess file or they need to give us a function in the CMS to block IPs and domains. BC touts that they are SEO friendly on their home page! Come on!

[Gekk071]

I completely agree with DanBho - this lack of native filtering support is complete BS.

Adobe, pay attention - your continued insistence on refusing to answer questions or address this problem in my opinion is bordering on being morally suspicious, if not negligent.

Either Adobe doesn't CARE about the problem, doesn't KNOW how to fix the problem, or for some reason it tacitly approve of third party small business customers having to deal with drastically inflated visitation stats to their websites.

I went round and promoted your stupid hosting platform to my clients. Now the ones using BC are neither happy nor amused at having over 90% of their site visits coming from black-hat referral spammers in Brazil, China, Russia and the CIS.... and being able to do nothing about it themselves.

Has it even occurred to you the damage your inaction may ultimately have on your CC subscriber's businesses - seeing as the analytics features in BC are rapidly becoming worthless? Do you really think this is good business practice?

Neither I nor my clients can rely on the visitation data BC feeds us anymore. Either pull up your socks and do something about the problem or I will have no choice but to start transitioning to other hosting platforms and you can stick your commissions up your arse.