Block Semalt .XYZ Referral Spam Traffic Bots with Cloudflare

I assume you already know what Semalt spam referral traffic bots are, hence you’re on this page to find a way to block off those annoying and frustrating unsolicited visits from Semalt.

There are several drawbacks and threats that these spammy bots pose to your website traffic. It can degenerate into poor overall traffic performance, messed up analytics reporting, and high bounce rates that can negatively impact your website rankings on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Also, it can lead to increased costs for server resources, as you may receive a large number of sessions with 100% bounce rates and no average time spent on your site.

Steps to block Semalt’s .XYZ Referral bots

Here is how to block Semalt’s .XYZ Referral bots

We will be using Cloudflare’s free version for this tutorial.

1. Proceed to Cloudflare to create an account, if you do not already have one.
2. Login to your account and click on add a website, enter the website root domain e.g. yourbusiness.com.ng
3. Pick a plan
4. Let Cloudflare scan and sync your existing DNS record, manually add missing records if there any
5. Copy Cloudflare’s nameserver and replace it with that of your hosting at your registrar
6. Allow a moment for propagation, once everything is set you can continue to the next step below
7. Log in again to Cloudflare and click on the website you just added
8. Locate Security >>WAF -(Web Application Firewall) in the menu section on the right side of the page
9. Click on the Create Firewall Rule button
10. Give the firewall a name, under the field, select referrer from the dropdown
11. Under operator, select contains
12. In the space to type in the value, type .xyz
13. Finally, choose the action as Block and click on the deploy firewall rule.

This firewall setup will successfully block thousands of Semalt’s .xyz referral bot traffic to your website.

Also, note that the firewall rule will block all .xyz domain referral traffic to your site even when they’re not Semalt’s.

But you should be fine because .xyz domains have recently been popularly used for spamming.