D_dubya

I haven’t had any Semalt referral spam since I made this change a couple of days ago. Actually, everything on my Analytics referral report now looks like a legitimate referral. I wasn’t getting Kambasoft, but I’m happy that all the Semalt variants are gone.

I noticed that the link where I poached this code has been edited for some reason, but I’m still happy with the solution. The same solution (for Kambasoft only) is posted here with a bit more explanation.

Hi all, I also have the problem of semalt.com referrer spam showing up in Google Analytics Referral Sources reports. This is bad news for me because I need to share that report with a client and bogus referrals are unhelpful at best.

At first I applied the solution described earlier in this thread and I promptly got a bunch of referrer spam from random semalt subdomains (like 22.semalt.com, 49.semalt.com etc) over the next few days. An .htaccess rule that blocks all subdomains of a referrer spammer’s domain is what we need here. After some searching, I added this to my .htaccess file:

# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (\.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses)\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule . – [F]

No referral spam all day since doing this. Here is my whole .htaccess file contents:

___

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (\.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses)\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule . – [F]

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>
# END WordPress
___

I’ll report back if this stops working or if I notice any bad side effects. This solution was originally posted on stackexchange and you can see that thread here.