Right now you’re probably thinking what the .htaccess file has to do with the topic of SEO. This is an SEO blog right? In fact, it plays quite an important role in the way your website is ranked by the search engines. The problem is that few people are aware of its importance and it could be affecting the ranking of your website right at this moment.
What Is A .htaccess File?
According to Wikipedia, a .htaccess file is “the default name of a directory-level configuration file that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration.” If you’re not a computer whiz (and I’m not), such a definition is simply impossible to understand. So putting aside all the computer programming terminology, a .htaccess file is a small file which is placed within a website to perform a number of functions.
In this article, we will talk about 2 of these functions (there are many others) because they are the only ones related to SEO. I will also demonstrate how you should write the .htaccess file so that you use your .htaccess file for maximum SEO effect.
Blocking Users
A .htaccess file can be successfully used to allow and block certain users by IP address or domain. The reason why you would want to do such a thing is because there are many online tools which people use to grab their competitor’s keywords. This allows them to try to rank for your keywords and potentially push you down the search rankings. For example, one such tool is SpyFu. They literally allow you to spy on your competitors. If you want stop such tools from being used on your website by your competitors, then simply structure your .htaccess file like the example at the bottom of this article.
Redirecting URLs
If you did a search on Google and looked through the search results, you will find that some websites are indexed with www. in front of them and others without it. If you were to search even deeper, you may even find some websites indexed twice, once with the www. in front of them and others without it. Why is this the case?
This is because backlinks have been built to both the www. and the non-www. but the search engine treats them as separate websites. This means that you are essentially building links to 2 separate websites instead of just the one. As a result, any SEO benefit is getting divided up between 2 websites when they could helping just one and getting much better results. In order to avoid such a problem, you have to redirect one URL to the other. Ideally, you want to redirect the URL with the lowest amount of backlinks to the one with the highest.
.htaccess File Example
Below is the .htaccess file I use for most of my websites. It blocks access to the most widely used spying tools on the Web as well as redirects a non-www. URL to a www. URL. Modify the code slightly by replacing “yourdomain” with your domain name (or URL).
Simply copy the code, paste it in a notepad file and then save it as .htaccess. You then upload it to your website using ftp or other means.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
order allow,deny
deny from all
order allow,deny
deny from 74.53.36.242
deny from 65.39.72.142
deny from 66.34.204.26
deny from 66.34.0.
deny from 66.34.255.
deny from keycompete.com
deny from keywordspy.com
deny from keywordspypro.com
deny from spyfu.com
deny from spyfoo.com
deny from foospy.com
deny from fuspy.com
allow from all
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} keycompete.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} keywordspy.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} keywordspypro.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spyfu.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} foospy.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} fuspy.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spyfoo.com [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* – [F]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.yourdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
It’s amazing how a little bit of code can make a big difference to your SEO efforts.
Just in case you’re wondering, this is the only time that I will make reference to programming code when talking about SEO. The role of the .htaccess file was too crucial to ignore and not share with all of you.