It seems like they are targeting smaller sites desperate for traffic.
They are trying to make the owners monitoring (Google) analytics look at their own site offering "SEO", "marketing", "social optimizations" and similar services that are probably as shady as their way of "contacting" the owners of low-traffic sites.
I have a site with less than 200 "visits" per month.
20% of traffic apparently comes from the site semalt.semalt.com.
10% comes from this site: buttons-for-website.com.
Another 6% is from this one: make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com
I don't think they are targeting anyone, I have always seen a few hundred a month on company websites. Some small sites simply aren't found yet by these spiders.
If you are seriously using analytics then you aren't really working in absolute numbers and the only problem is sporadic noise.
The target audience for these sites are obviously people who want more traffic and want to make money with their sites.
Bigger sites couldn't be targeted cost-effectively because they would have to make a lot more noise for themselves to even show up in the analytics reports. Also, the people reading the reports are more likely professional and aware of those techniques.
Their algorithm is probably not so advanced, so they just shoot lots of requests to any site they can find. Luckily for them, most sites are small and unsuccessful.
I can confirm this. Got a site with very low traffic and one with 138K sessions a month. These russian spam referral sites are all over the low traffic site but they barely appear on the high traffic one. Not sure why Google hasn't blocked these yet. The same domains (ilovevitaly.com, darodar.com, pricer.com etc.) have been referral spamming since at least mid December. In fact the range of domains doing this was so limited it was relatively easy to set up exclusion rules in GA. The only annoying thing is that the exclusions aren't retroactive.
Actually, was referring to small, desperate sites rather than the SEO motivation. Being spam, makes sense to target less popular sites. I'm not going to investigate every referrer on a busy site, but if I've only got a dozen referrers then I might check out one site sending me 50 visits.
I have some low activity Google code sites with analytics enabled. 50% of the referrals now come from a Russian SEO site starting a few months ago. They're generating unique bogus subdomains such as forum.topic52148208.darodar DOT com for each tracker ID they target.
Can't Google just blacklist these sites and make them disappear?
I have a site with less than 200 "visits" per month. 20% of traffic apparently comes from the site semalt.semalt.com. 10% comes from this site: buttons-for-website.com. Another 6% is from this one: make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com