The htaccess file and SEO

The .htacess file is a simple txt base file that tells a browser or a search engine what to do when displaying or redirecting certain web pages. There are many more technical IT based individuals out there who can tell you the full benefits of the .htaccess file and may suggest my wording or explain nation is not technically right, but to be honest all I am interested in explaining is why in certain cases an .htacess file can be a major a huge difference to your SEO results.

It mainly relates around duplicate content of which Google does not particularly like and often can’t deal with very well. In better words it is possible you have more than one version of the same content on your website without you knowing how or why.

Here is an example. Have you ever typed in your URL without the www and found it still shows your homepage? Well the problem is, Google sees this as a different URL to the page with the WWW included. It may be the same physical copy on your local drive, but to Google this is 2 versions of the same thing.

The way around this is to create a simple .htaccess file in your route directory that redirects the non www version to the version with www. (you can do this the opposite way should you choose). Another version of your homepage could be shown as a index.html, php or asp file. Again this may be the same physical page as the URL without the files extension, but to Google this is another copy of duplicate content.

So by going through your site and identifying any pages that can be seen as duplicate content to Google should all be redirected to one master version? The other good news is that all the page rank is also diverted to the master version, as it is possible to have different page rank vales on every different URL version of that page.

The .htaccess file can only be used on Linux servers and not those that are Windows based, (that use asp or similar) to redirect pages in these, you need to go into the server to do so. I prefer Linux for this very reason, it give me more flexibility to deal with issue that Google do not handle very well from a SEO point of view, of course from a programmers point of view it could be a different story.