If you’re in the search marketing industry, or you have anything to do with websites, you’ve probably logged into Google Analytics. Well, that’s probably an understatement: you probably log into Google Analytics several times a day, like I do. And I am sure that you’ve seen these two people over and over and over again. You’ve seen them so often, and so many people have seen them by now, they’re famous.

Have you ever wondered who are the faces of Google Analytics? Who are the two famous people that are shown every time you log into Google Analytics? [Read more…]

Well, apparently there is a new referrer spammer out there, called 4Webmasters.org that has started showing up in Google Analytics as a referral source. If you suddenly see an increase in traffic on your site, check to see which sites are the referral sources. Hopefully the source of new traffic to your site is something positive, like better search engine rankings. But, it might actually be referrer spam. I noticed that 4Webmasters.org just started a lot of referral spam in the past few days, as I’m seeing it in the Google Analytics accounts of several different sites. [Read more…]

A while back I wrote about Semalt.com and how it has been showing up in Google Analytics as a referrer for many websites. As far as I can tell, it’s some sort of bot, and not a real visitor. So, when you see something like this as a major referrer in your Google Analytics it’s pretty annoying. I have had numerous clients of mine inquire as to what semalt was, and had to explain to them that it’s not real visitors. Well, now if you go to semalt.com (I’m not going to link to that site), you’ll see a message from them–that the site is under attack (as of the writing of this post).

[Read more…]

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how to block Semalt (also known as Semalt.com) from showing up in your Google Analytics account. In this post, I’ll tell you how to block Semalt from accessing your website using the site’s .htaccess file. Just as a warning, you need to be a pretty advanced user to do this, as if you do something wrong in the .htaccess file of your website there’s a possibility that you’ll take your website down. Each and every request (every hit on every file) first accesses the .htaccess file before your website loads. This is one way that you can stop visitors and bots from even having access to your website.

If you’d like to block semalt.com (or any other domain name) by using the .htaccess file, then here’s a few lines of code to add to the file: [Read more…]