There seems to be something odd happening with a site called Semalt. I have an unusually high number of hits from their site that implies one of their users or “competitors” was reviewing my blog.
Add to that, their homepage only has a sign up form under their tagline “It’s easy to understand what’s going on with your Google rankings”, there is absolutely no other information to be found on them when you search for it, and many many others are currently asking the same “What the heck?” questions as I am…it doesn’t seem like anything good so far.
Do yourself a favor, and sit back and wait. It’s not worth giving out your information to Semalt until they give us more information first. Either way, their plan seems to be working. They are getting lots and lots of mentions everywhere I look. So, of course, I write a blog post. 😉
Nicole K
Update 1.24.14: Will Grundy from the blog “The Grinning Skull” posted this letter from Semalt in reply to his original post written to them.
I’m still solidly “wait and see”.
Update 1.30.14: Andrew from Semalt replied directly in our comments section below. Check it out for more information.
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Semalt is a professional webmaster analytics tool that opens the door to new opportunities for the market monitoring, yours and your competitors’ positions tracking and comprehensible analytics business information.
You can get more information about Semalt here – http://blog.semalt.com/pleased-to-meet-you
Thanks for the information, Andrew!
Hey Andrew, you missed some stuff out, don’t forget to tell people that in addition to this, you lot are shifty, have questionable motives, count as spam for many automated web services and have politician like answers regarding the truth.
Thanks for the comment, Will! Even with Andrew reaching out, I definitely feel “shifty” is the perfect word to describe all of this. I’m just going to continue to observe. 🙂
Hey,
Semalt are one of the most annoying companies I have ever had to deal with.
I manage a lot of SEO clients and upon logging into their Analytics I notice they ALL have had hundreds of referrals from Semalt. This is a pain because even though I have removed all URL’s from their crawler so I shouldn’t see any more visits from them, there is nothing I can do about the historic data which is already in Analytics.
Now whenever I create a report that compares data to previous periods I have to enable a custom segment which filters out the traffic – sure this works ok but I shouldn’t have to do it.
Semalt – it’s all well and good allowing us to remove ourselves from your crawler but we shouldn’t be crawled in the first place; if you set it up properly we wouldn’t see that data in analytics and most likely would never have known you were crawling our sites.
Which leads me to believe this is intentional, I bet they have gained thousands of visits to their site because people are wondering what is sending them so much traffic; and I am sure amateur webmasters or small business owners have created an account and maybe even paid for an account.
Rant over!
P.S sorry for letting my frustration out on your blog post Nicole 😉
Ricky
Hi Ricky,
Great comment! Until I saw your tweet, I wasn’t aware of how much has been going on since my last update. Looks like another one is needed.
Thanks for commenting!
Nicole