Why MY website?

Okay, if you're like me, you may have wondered why these spammers do what they do? Much like blocking pop-up ads with an ad-blocker, some spammers use a similar technique.

Here's one of the worst ones out there:

See-Your-Website-Here.com

These guys are so very annoying. They use referral spam in a very frustrating method. Basically, they promote websites via referral spam and use it as a form of "lead generation". Quite unethical in my humble opinion, but that's the "product" they sell.

They will show your website in other webmasters' analytics so the offended website owner will visit you. It's very much like email spam, but on the web.

Semalt.com

Semalt markets some SEO products for on- and off-page SEO that from the outside seems legitimate.

They provide analytics for link metrics and keyword usage.

Sure, it seems legit, but their data acquisition methods are FAR from that. They use a bot to crawl the entire Internet and index webpages, much like Google and Bing, but they don't disable analytics tracking as do Google and Bing.

Additionally, if you want to have your website removed from their database, good luck! They have a simple "removal" form on their site, but seem to ignore any requests produced from it. Many website owners say Semalt still visits them after repeatedly requesting removal.

These are just two of the major annoyances out there. There are several lists available - I'll get to that shortly.