Semalt Crawler: How to Remove it From Google Analytics

Screenshot 2015-02-20 15.56.35“What is Semalt?

According to their website “675,632 companies signed up for Semalt to improve user and search engine trust to their websites.” Really!?

They go on to say…

Semalt is a professional webmaster analytics tool that opens the door to new opportunities for the market monitoring, yours and your competitors’ positions tracking and comprehensible analytics business information.

What it is for anyone building and managing websites, or analysts and online marketers, is a pain in the behind. But lucky for all of us there is a solution, for now, and Semalt themselves have provided it.

What’s the Problem?

Semalt’s crawler is constantly (like every day) crawling the internet including your website. Not a big deal if your site gets 1,000’s of visitors a day. However for smaller sites this activity can skew the reports as the crawler visits all appear as “new visitors” and have a 100% bounce rate – see screen shot below. If they are not aware of the ‘Semalt affect’ his could affect a search marketer’s ability to accurately analyze the data and make good decisions.

Semalt as Referrer in Google Analytics

How to Stop the Semalt Crawler from Crawling

I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it actually is to remove sites from Semalt’s crawler. Again, directly from their website…

Webmasters, SEO and market specialists and other persons concerned often get anxious about Semalt crawlers visiting their websites and displaying data about these visits on the web analytics systems, such as: Google Analytics, StatCounter, Sitemeter, WordPress My Stats and other.

A Semalt crawler is a technical bot of the webmaster analytics tool Semalt.com. According to the software algorithm Semalt crawler bots visit website and gather statistical data for our service simulating real user behavior: unique IP, browser, display resolution etc. This information is used exclusively within the Semalt.com project and isn’t revealed to a third party. Our crawler bots have 100% bounce rate and don’t click on advertising banners (cpc, cpa, cpm systems) or extend links. No need to look for some hidden motive or conspiracy when your website was visited by our crawler as it was mentioned above. All the visits are automatic and random.

We assume some webmasters won’t agree with “a mess” in their statistics and robots gathering the information. Anyway, we would like to bring our sincere apologies to all the persons who had any sort of problems caused by our service.

So if you are ready to remove Semalt from your analytics reports, simply click here, and add the URLs of the sites you would like removed. No verification process required, which is also interesting.

Got questions or comments? Leave them in the comments box below and we’ll get back to you pronto.

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7 thoughts on “Semalt Crawler: How to Remove it From Google Analytics”

    • Thanks for the heads-up Juhli. I haven’t come across those others enough that it was worth the effort of removing them. Semalt on the other hand was the #1 referrer for about 10 different websites.

      Reply
    • What are you talking about? I use their analytics tools, but I don’t see any referral spam in my reports… what do you mean?

      Reply
      • Diaichi, when you say you use their analytics tools does that mean you are a client of theirs. Perhaps they filter out clients.

        Reply
  1. This is the best article I’ve found on the persistent referral spam (especially the idiot from Russia) that cuts through a lot of information.

    http://www.analyticsedge.com/2014/12/removing-referral-spam-google-analytics/

    As for crawlers like Semalt, my preferred tactic will be blocking at the .htaccess level. There are a few others to look for in that category, such as buttons-for-website.

    Many people have reported Semalt spam increasing after an appeal to the source.

    It’s a jungle out there! 🙂

    Reply
  2. Thanks Ray – that’s a pretty thorough analysis. I was skeptical of the Semalt removal link as well so I tested it on a couple of sites and it has been legit so far. Zero referral spam from them.

    Reply
  3. That’s true. You can add them to the exclusion list. Have you noticed when you do that, there seems to be more of them creeping into the referral list? So what we’ve done is leverage filters to create a clean view of the analytics without the reporting. Remember when adding filters, they cannot be undone, so use a child view to implement this. Thanks for commenting.

    Reply

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