SEMAlt.com Under DDOS Attack

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).

In a previous post, I wrote about how to block SEMALT from showing up as a referrer in Google Analytics. And I’ve even gotten plenty of Tweets from representatives of Semalt trying to explain that they’re really not that bad. They have even commented on my post, explaining semalt.com:

But why would so many people be ticked off at them? From what I’ve been told by sources, they (or someone promoting their services) use unorthodox tactics to promote the semalt “service” and the semalt website.