Today, I’m off to Gainesville, FL. Not so much for vacationing, but because my grandmother is having a brain tumor removed at Shand’s Hospital on Wednesday morning. Not to worry, I’ve got my laptop with me and I’ll be plugging away from my hotel room every day I’m there.

The timing didn’t work out too wonderfully as I am also in the process of moving SiteFever to a dedicated server so provide better speed and reliability to this blog.

To assist in offsetting the additional cost of the dedicated server, I am offering statewide links at a cost of only $10/month. Your link will be visible on every page of SiteFever.com in the right hand column under “Helpful Links”. If interested, please contact me.

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This is the last in a three part htaccess tutorial. Feel free to review part 1 and part 2 before continuing.

In this tutorial, I will show you two final ways you can use htaccess on your website to make life a little easier for you.

Remove WWW

Why would you want to remove “www” from your domain name? Well, in terms of SEO, many search engines including Google will see “www.sitefever.com” as a different website than “sitefever.com”. Each would have its own PR ranking, and that’s not good.

You can test it out here on this website. Look in your address bar. There shouldn’t be any “www” in my domain name. Go ahead and try to type it in and see what happens. My htaccess file forces the removal of “www” so that all the statistics for sitefever.com don’t get split between “sitefever.com” and “www.sitefever.com”. Here’s how to do it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously, you would want to change “yoursite.com” to whatever your domain name is.

Change Default Home Page

Have you ever wanted to display a special notice to all of your website visitors, such as an upcoming change to the website or any other important announcement? Well, what’s the first page a visitor sees when they type in your domain name in their browser? Your “index” page? Well, you can make it so that the first page a visitor sees is something like “announcement.html”, which would contain your important announcement. Keep in mind, your visitors will only see this page if they try to view the default index page of the directory. They can still type in another address or a specific page and bypass this altogether. Here’s the code:

DirectoryIndex announcement.html

Again, adding that line of code to your htaccess file will bypass your “index” page in a directory and display “announcement.html” instead. As always, you can change that page name to whatever you would like.

Conclusion

This would conclude the three part series on .HTACCESS- Your New Best Friend. I hope that you gathered some information from these articles that you find helpful and will possibly implement on your own website.

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Starting today, you’ve probably noticed something new on the site! Kontera has arrived!

If you haven’t heard of Kontera before, look for the text with the two solid lines under it. Hold your mouse over the text to reveal an ad from a Kontera publisher. What I love about Kontera is that the ads do not take up any additional space on the site, it just feeds itself using the keywords that I am already using.

If you haven’t already noticed, I’m not a huge fan of Google Adwords. I hardly use AdWords and I am thinking about phasing it out altogether. In any event, I just wanted to fill everyone in with the changes that are happening to SiteFever.com as it is continually being refined to become a better blog for everyone.

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What type of reaction do you have when somebody says something negative about your business or your website? If you manage a blog or a forum, what do you do when somebody complains about your website in one way or another? Delete the comment? Return the favor?

It’s a simple case of mathematics. The larger you get, the more publicity you will receive. I hope I’m not surprising you when I tell you that all publicity is not positive. You should be prepared for the negative comments, because they will surely present themselves at one time or another.

You know the old saying: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”. To an extent, that statement can be true. I’ll take the first recent example that comes to mind. Paris Hilton. I can’t believe I just mentioned her name! I have absolutely no interest in her, her life or anything she does. But I could not help but notice the explosive amount of publicity about her in the news recently when she was sentenced to jail. Was that bad publicity? It depends on how you look at it. If not for that, I would have never mentioned her name. What about the infamous Larry King interview after she was released? Would she have been on Larry King that night if she had not just been released from jail? Probably not.

When bad publicity or comments come your way, give it a 24 hour cooling down period before you take any action. The worst publicity for you comes from yourself, not what other people say. If you’re heated up, you may say something that you will later come to regret. After 24 hours, decide how to handle the matter.

If all comments about you are positive, what would prompt the next person who comes across them to add their thoughts? On the other hand, if you’ve got a blog with many loyal readers and somebody comes along out of the blue and posts a bad comment about it, instead of deleting it why not let your readers stick up for you? They will, just give them time. It will prompt more and more comments to your blog, and your visitors will come back over and over again to see what else has been said on the matter. It’s just free publicity.

Of course, there are times when you can truly be in the wrong. Don’t be afraid to apologize or admit fault even if you think that it may damage your online reputation. In contrast, your readers will most likely gain a better impression of you and respect you for your honesty.

There are, of course, the rotten apples that will spam your site or just include some language that you just will not tolerate on your site. There’s nothing wrong with deleting the comments when necessary.

Just remember that talking about your site whether positive or negative is still talking about your site. Don’t make the mistake that many others do of cherry picking your visitors comments. If you really want to make a success of your site, you should be interested in what your visitors have to say and you’ll understand that comments both positive and negative are just a thing that comes with the business.

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Now that you’ve got your htaccess file created, you’re ready to start using it. Believe it or not, your htaccess file is used for more than just error pages, and I’m going to show you some of what you can do.

If you didn’t catch part 1, which is an introduction to htaccess, read that post first.

Block Users by IP

If you notice that somebody is coming to your site and trying to do something you don’t like, just ban them! This is especially useful if you have a website where users can contribute to the content of the site, such as with a forum or blog, and somebody is spamming you.

So, open up your .htaccess file and type the following:

order allow,deny
deny from 595.33.8.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

Of course, you would replace the IP’s with the ones you wish to block. You can either type in the entire IP address to block that particular IP, or you can block groups of IP addresses.

For instance, in the above example, deny from 012.34.5 will block all IP’s under that one, such as:

012.34.5.1
012.34.5.2
012.34.5.3, etc.

Deny Referrer

You can also deny a visitor if they are coming from a particular referrer. A new tactic used by people to hurt your search engine rankings is to send a lot of bad traffic your way. For example, if you rank #1 in Google for the search term “cool blog” and I’m #2, I might spend $50 to send 500,000 fake garbage bot visitors to your site hoping that Google will recognize your traffic is not all genuine and bump your position down a little, giving me the #1 spot. In such a case, you would see thousands and thousands of hits coming from the same referring URL in your site stats, usually coming from a cheap traffic company.

Note: Your hosting provider must have mod_rewrite enabled on your server in order for this code to work.
Here’s the code:

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} trash\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Replace “trash” with the domain and “.com” with any other extension the site may be (.net, .info, etc.)

To block more than one referring URL, you would use:

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} trash\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} moretrash\.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]

The only difference here is that you would add “[NC,OR]” after each domain listed except for the last one in the list.

If you get a 500 Internal Server Error when using this code, just delete the “#” in the second line of code.

Prevent Hotlinking

Somebody stealing your bandwidth? If you have a picture or video on your website that people like, sometimes they may post it on their websites, but it will be pulling everything off of your website using your bandwidth.
Again, you will need mod_rewrite to be enabled by your web host.
Here’s how to do this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F]

Of course, you would replace “yourdomain.com” in the code above with your actual domain name. You would also enter all the domain extensions you would like to disallow hotlinking to in the last line. The code above is set to disallow hotlinking any gif, jpg, js or css files from your site.

To really have fun, you can show whatever content you want when somebody tries to hotlink from your site. For example, if somebody tries to hotlink a pretty image of a sunset on the beach from your site, an image saying “I STEAL BANDWIDTH!” can be shown.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yoursite.com/yousteal.jpg [R,L]

In the code above, if somebody tries to hotlink a gif or jpg image from your site, it will display a picture called yousteal.jpg on their site!

I’ve got some more tricks up my sleeve for you regarding htaccess, but I’ll have to include them in my next post on this series, part 3.

If I make these posts too long, I’ll get a ton of angry emails…

Check back soon for .HTACCESS- Your New Best Friend (Part 3)

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I was browsing around the net today and came across a very informative site. Directtraffic.org is a website that offers SEO and campaign management services.

However, I found an article on their site that grabbed my attention:

Beware of Site Wide Text Link Ads

I found the information to be very well written and straightforward. For the most part, I agree with what the article says and it actually made me think twice about some things I have implemented on my own website.

I thought that I would share the link with you all, because I feel the information in that article could be very helpful to many website owners.

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Anyone who has tampered around with web design has probably heard of htaccess, even if they are not totally familiar with what it is, or what it can do. The fact is, every single website owner should know what htaccess is, be familiar with its functionality, and USE IT!

This article will give you a brief introduction to what htaccess is, and teach you how by using it, you can make your website more secure, improve your search engine rankings, and give your website a more professional image.

.htaccess- What Is It?

Wikipedia’s definition for .htaccess is as follows:

“.htaccess (Hypertext Access) is the default name of Apache’s directory-level configuration file. It provides the ability to customize configuration directives defined in the main configuration file. The configuration directives need to be in .htaccess context and the user needs appropriate permissions.”

.htaccess is a simple ASCII file, which you can create using a text editor such as Notepad. Many people get confused as to how the file should be named. The important thing to know is that .htaccess is the file extension, not the name. You notice that nothing appears before the period (.)- not file.htaccess, pagename.htaccess, but just .htaccess.

Because htaccess is handled by Apache and not NT, they will only work on web servers running Apache. If your web hosting is done on a Linux server, you’ll be fine.

Creating an .htaccess File

Before I go in to this, I must mention that some web hosts (mostly free web hosting providers) may not allow you to use htaccess files. Be sure you are able to use htaccess files so that you don’t get into trouble with your web host and get your account suspended. If you already have an htaccess file on your site, you should be fine. Also, I am writing this article as a tutorial and don’t accept any responsibility for anything that happens if you goof something up, or if you run into any problems! Your htaccess file can do a lot of good, but it can do a lot of damage as well, and I don’t want to be responsible for that!

First, you can login to your website using your FTP program. I will not go into the specifics of FTP, as this is beyond the scope of this article. We’ll assume you know this much already. Browse to the root folder of your website, many times named “public_html”. If you don’t see a file named “.htaccess” already, all you have to do is open up a text editor such as Notepad (In Windows, click Start > Run > type “notepad” > OK). Save the blank file as .htaccess, making sure not to leave a .txt or any other extension at the end of the name. Upload the file to your public_html folder in ASCII mode (NOT binary). If you don’t know what I’m talking about don’t worry- most FTP programs will automatically select the correct upload mode. Be sure that the permissions, or attributes for this file are set to 644 (RW-R–R–), to prevent other people from having access to this file.

Congratulations! You’ve just created your .htaccess file!

NOTE: If using FrontPage extensions for your website, you can not edit the .htaccess file without ruining your FrontPage extensions. ONLY modify your .htaccess file if you ARE NOT using FrontPage extensions on your website.

Working With htaccess

Now that you’ve got the file on your site, you’re ready to begin. If you already had an .htaccess file, you can add what you’d like on to it.

This is the end of part 1 of our .htaccess tutorial. Part 2 will walk you through some of the functionality of your .htaccess file.

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