SEO Tweaks to .htaccess File

Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization |

Google is a pretty smart search engine, whereas some of the others are not quite up to the task.Â In order for you to get maximum PageRank to your pages, you want to make sure that the SE’s only see one copy of that you are serving up.

Did you know the following may be considered different pages inthe SEs, even though they all lead to the same place?

http://www.yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com/
http://yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/index.htm
http://yoursite.com/index.htm

In order to get the SEs to always get to the page you want (I generally like to send them to http://www.yoursite.com/), you can tweak a file called .htacess in the root of your website.

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}^yoursite\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

That is it!Â Simply replace “yoursite” with “yourDomainName” (If you are a .net or .org, replace the”com” with either “net” or “org”)

Now the search engines will rewrite all the other options show inthe bulleted list above the same way, reducing your duplicate content footprint, and increasing your Page Rank.

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