What is Semalt? No one knows.

This is not a movie-related post, but this is something important everyone should know, especially blog owners.

For the past couple weeks, you may have been noticing web traffic from semalt.com. The site doesn’t give any information, and requires an account to proceed with any site info. They appear to be some kind of search traffic analysis site. Until we can figure out what these folks are actually about, it is not recommended you associate with the site. 

EDIT: I believe that this is simply guerrilla/viral marketing. You see the site, your curiosity is piqued, you head to the site, and you sign up. Still proceed with caution.

30 thoughts on “What is Semalt? No one knows.”

  3. It would very much appear to be a web crawler that continuously hits your website . In doing so, it increases it ranking and in-time will use this to grow its business through a 3rd party. Once it becomes more well know, I believe it will draw a lot of attention and business from other analytic web programs. I think it would be wise to stay clear of this site. My opinion only.

  4. To block semalt.com from visiting your site and making havoc with your statistics add this to the end of your .htaccess file….

    SetEnvIfNoCase Via evil-spam-proxy spammer=yes
    SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-domain.com spammer=yes
    SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-keyword spammer=yes
    SetEnvIfNoCase Via pinappleproxy spammer=yes
    SetEnvIfNoCase Referer semalt.com spammer=yes
    SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes

    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    Deny from env=spammer

  5. I’ve been getting hits from these guys for the last few days. I won’t be doing anything further until they actually provide some information on their website and stop being illusive.

    They’re bringing views from the most obscure of places though – this time Bosnia and Herzegovina; not exactly on my radar considering my blog is about British archaeology… Never had views from there before!

          1. A good trick, yes. But when all the hits only land on your front page it’s a bit of a bummer…

      2. I find Semalt to be the best for small webmasters like myself. They gave me an 0.99$ a
        month offer (two months ago) and my site is near page 1 on a 660.000 searches keyword. Who
        in this world gives you some help like that when you need it? You can find the offer and screenshots of my rankings here http://semaltreview.blogspot.com/.

        1. Like they say, there are 2 sides to every issue. A major complaint about Semalt is they use inappropriate means to achieve an end. If they better your search engine rankings, it’s because they are using dummy website visitors to your site and dummy backlinks to fool the search engines. The search engines are heavily influenced by how popular thay think a certain website is. Good luck on your business.

  7. Definitely viral/guerilla marketing trying to sell what you get free from google analytics, They don’t even try to cover it up much, followed a spike/peak in traffic back to them from a bot called ‘crawler’. With only a one year lease on the web address and obvious Bot trawling can only mean scam or at least money for nothing, just analytics dressed up to look pretty, nothing new and nothing worth paying for 😛

  8. Came here after googling the name. Also getting fake traffic, from loads of countries. They can’t be in all those places. Its odd, and a bit annoying. Thanks for Blogging this though.

  9. Very odd indeed! the online threat alert note makes me wary. I will use it for the 7 days but really not sure what it does! has anyone had any ideas on it?

    1. I believe it exists for analyzing search engine data, and it appears to work. It’s pattern of advertising is the only majorly concerning thing at hand.

        1. Not much of anything. The service looks legit, but I haven’t logged in. I assume the free trial’s over and I have no interest in proceeding.

  12. I have also had a fair amount of traffic to my blog for the past two days from this site. My stats tell me it’s from Russia.

      1. Thanks for the info! They arrived, drove up the stats (from Russia, then Cuba and Tunisia) and now seem to have disappeared just as fast.

  14. I just noticed traffic from this site today too. They describe themselves as “Professional keyword ranking monitoring service with competitor analysis.”

  15. I’ve had several visitors from this site the past 3-4 days, and I’m also wondering what kind of site it is.
    Something with analyzing keywords?

    1. Something like that. I don’t think anyone is really sure. They just came out of no where. I checked and the domain name was registered very recently.

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