I’m getting clients asking me to block the garbage crawlers semalt.semalt.com and buttons-for-website.com from their site. This can easily be done in .htaccess but I’m wondering how I can block them server wide?
Found a good solution. I already use ModSecurity, seemed this was the perfect tool for the job. I found some custom rules written for referrer spammers.
It seems to be working well…
[Sun Mar 01 18:14:42 2015] [error] [client 87.20.151.203] ModSecurity: [file “/etc/httpd/modsecurity.d/flameeyes_30_refererspam.conf”] [line “14”] [id “433001”] [msg “Known referer spammers.”] Access denied with code 403 (phase 1). Matched phrase “semalt.com/” at REQUEST_HEADERS:Referer. [hostname “mydomain.com”] [uri “/”] [unique_id “VPOrcriaLzIAABc-C2AAAAAO”]