***NEW! After many tries of different codes, I decided to contact my web host for that site (www.curbal.com) and after a few tries they managed to block semalt. Unfortunately they did not disclosed how they did it. 

The codes I tested are at the end of the post.

If you find the right Regex, please send me a line.

***

I started receiving traffic in my new site from a site called Semalt. Something was odd about them, and after their first visits to my site, I started receiving visits from a musica.descargar-musica-gratis.net, also odd as the site that was receiving the traffic is about Google Analytics for beginners and the referrer is about music downloads.

This type of sites are called referrer spam.

This technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publish their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then inadvertently link back to the spammer’s site. These links will be indexed by search engines as they crawl the access logs. (source:Wikipedia)

Never click on these links as they might lead to sites with virus or Trojans. Do instead a Google search on the link.

So, how do you do to get rid of the spammers?

The best way is to modify your .htaccess files and block them all together.

For that you will need to access your .htaccess file and copy a bit of code.

Log in your synology, and access FileStation and the directory where your wordpress files are stored and delete according to the previous step (I am using NetDrive to do this):

If you dont have a htaccess file, create one using note++:

Add the following lines (red text) to the beginning of your code. It should look something like this:

The code below blocked all semalt’s visits with the exception of : semalt.semalt.com 

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ – [L]

# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses).com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(([^.]+.)+)?semalt.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F]

 

Htaccess code that did not work

First try:

# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses).com$ [NC]
RewriteRule . – [F]

Second try:

# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses).com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.semalt.com [NC,OR]
RewriteRule . – [F]

3rd try:

# block spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses).com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^.]+.)*semalt.com [NC,OR]

RewriteRule . – [F]

4rth try:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses).com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.semalt.com [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

5rth try:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (.)?(semalt|kambasoft|savetubevideo|seoanalyses).com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(([^.]+.)+)?semalt.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F]

 

 Remove from Google Analytics (if you dont have access to htaccess)

Another really annoying consequence of  Referrer spam is that it will inflate your traffic like bots and spiders do, so if you don’t have access to your htaccess file, you can at least remove them from Google Analytics.

I have a tutorial on how to do this on my new site.