Q: Why don’t you want Semalt in your Google Analytics stats?
A: Because it distorts your website performance data. This makes it more difficult to make great marketing decisions. In fact hiding Semalt in your website statistics is one of the best marketing decisions you can make right now.
Q: How do I stop Semalt from spidering my wordpress site?
Answer: This article provides some code you can copy and paste into your “htaccess” file ( if your on a linux based server ) . For those hosted on Windows I don’t have a solution yet.
Q: How do I actually get semalt.com removed from my reports for time already past ( like the last 30 days ) ?
A: I haven’t figured it out yet!
Analytics has “views”… if you create a new view of your property you cannot view your historical data with this view… it starts the moment you create it. I need my historical data reports ( for example the last 30 days vs last year same time ) to ignore the semalt traffic.
Before applying the advanced filter: Bouce Rate is 23.98% ( worse than last year by 23% ! )
Google Analytics screenshot… Before filtering out semalt
After applying the advanced filter:
Google Analytics screenshot… After filtering out semalt
See how much some spam in your numbers can confuse things! Without the filters my Avg visit duration was only up 20%…. after filtering out spam I can see we’re actually up 40%. I can now see that the bounce rate is only up 3.82 %.
After applying one more referring url out I got closer to my real data.
Q: So how will this info help you out?
A: It will allow you to make more informed decisions… for example: Should I give my web team a raise or ask them to buckle down? Should I keep paying these marketing consultants? Etc.
Q: How do I actually add these filters to Analytics reports?
A: Use these settings by going into your “Acquisition > All Traffic ” report… and click “Advanced Filter” to enter in these settings ( see below screenshot ).
Screenshot of Google Analytics showing the “Advanced Filter” settings to exclude semalt.com traffic from your reports. Note that I also added a second exclusion… one from codecanyon.com traffic… they were not spamming… I had just asked a question on one of their message boards and it resulted in several visitors from that site that were not actual prospective customers.
Q: How do I stop semalt from coming to my site?
A: You can request removal from their spider here: