SEMALT began popping up in our Google Analytics stats recently as a traffic source, and after reviewing the figures, it definitely looked like a spammy bot. With a quick search, it appears that SEMALT is an SEO tool that claims to offer help with understanding Google search results for those that sign up for it.
Regardless of whether or not this could be deemed as a spammy bot wasting our server’s bandwidth, we decided to block it, and you can too with a simple .htaccess rule if your website is on an Apache server (most are):
# block visitors referred from semalt.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]