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I'm getting a lot of spam referral traffic from semalt.semalt.com/referral on my website. I took a look at the link and there’s very little information about this.

The number of website visits is 185 this month, and they result in a 100% bounce rate.

So how I can block this website?

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  • What web server? Apache? IIS? I can help with .htaccess.
    – closetnoc
    Jul 29, 2014 at 5:57
  • web server is Apache
    – Rakhi Sharma
    Jul 29, 2014 at 6:01
  • I get a bunch of these referrals too, but since I study this stuff, I allow it.
    – closetnoc
    Jul 29, 2014 at 6:11
  • This should work. I used an older example .htaccess that has a lot of entries in it. Let me know how it goes.
    – closetnoc
    Jul 29, 2014 at 6:22

1 Answer 1

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This should work...

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.semalt\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

...will force a 403 error. Otherwise...

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.semalt\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.gosomewhereelse.com [R,L]

... will send them some where else. (just change the domain name please.)

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  • semalt original url is www.semalt.com and in my google analytics shows in semalt.semalt.com/referral so which url i add
    – Rakhi Sharma
    Jul 29, 2014 at 6:23
  • I have semalt.semalt.com as the referral here. But if you want, you can just use semalt.com. If you are not aware of regular expressions, I intentionally did not use ^ and $ which denote the beginning of the expression and the end. In this case, semalt.com will match semalt.semalt.com just fine.
    – closetnoc
    Jul 29, 2014 at 6:49
  • What do you mean by "semalt original url is www.semalt.com"? ... just to be sure that semalt.com is not the domain of your site? Also, since the RewriteCond pattern is a regular expression (as closetnoc suggests), the . (period) should strictly be escaped to match a literal . rather than any character, ie. semalt\.semalt\.com.
    – MrWhite
    Jul 29, 2014 at 8:39
  • @w3d Yes. You are technically correct! I edited the answer to make the change. Regex in .htaccess assumes, or at least used to, that text/domain specification was possible and was rather forgiving, hence my examples are probably more lazy than they should be. I would rather be technically correct and so I appreciate the flag. My examples did work okay when Apache 2.2 was released, but it is far better to CYA of course. Thanks again for the reminder!!
    – closetnoc
    Jul 29, 2014 at 15:33

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