So you see Semalt.com in your Analytics account? It has brought you quite a bit of visitors that are tracked in your referrals via Google Analytics but it seems fishy. When you visit their website, you notice that they are trying to sell you another product that is very similar to Google Analytics. This is the truth, they have found a way to manipulate your data to show you an advertisement in your Google Analytics. Since Semalt.com has found a way to appear in your Google Analytics data without having any intent to visit your site, this means that their visits are fake traffic.
How does it happen?
Semalt has a bot (program) designed to crawl your website (visit and look around). Once semalt has crawled your website your Google Analytics account for your website will track the instance in your Google Analytics data.
What does this mean?
Since the Semalt traffic is fake traffic, it can be frustrating to make valid conclusions from your Google Analytics data while it is tracking Semalt.com visits. While Semalt.com visits are being tracked in your Google Analytics data, it becomes skewed by the the fake website traffic from the referral due to Semalt.com
Each time the Semalt.com bot crawls your website many metrics become messed up a little. Here is a list of the Google Analytics metrics that are influenced by Semalt.com’s crawler:
- Total Visits – A visit is counted every time it returns
- Bounce rate – Each fake visit is a bounce because they do not navigate to more than one page.
- Pages per visit – Since the bot only crawls one page, your pages per visit is driven down, which is bad.
- Conversion Rate – Conversion rate is affected because each time the bot bounces, it also counts as a visit that didn’t convert into a sale.
What can I do to stop Semalt.com from visiting my website?
Fortunately there is a simple fix to get rid of semalt.com visits. All you have to do is navigate to semalt.com’s page where you can opt out of receiving website crawlers from Semalt.com. Here is the URL to get there: http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php . You just type in your website domain in the list that they provide and Semalt.com will not send any more unwanted bots to skew your data!
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