Explain .htaccess file

I hear people talking about the .htaccess file and how it is important when making pages search engine friendly. Can somebody explain this file to me and what exactly it does, where it is located, what system it runs on, etc....

Thanks

 

maybe this will give you an idea othe power .htaccess files hold http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html

 

Also see http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=49 ...

 

I use mine to redirect http://website.com to http://www.website.com

 

For SEO point of view mainly it requier for redirection purpose.

Redirection can be perform in following ways:

1) Meta referesh
2) JS or other server scripts.
3) .htaccess file.

Mainly google do not like redirection other than .htaccess

 

Did that work ??

onces I used above code, but it did not perform, after that I use following code, and it works perfectly.

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

 

.htaccess is usually placed in your root directory of your site.

You can place .htaccess file in any directory where you wish to do certain things.

All firectories beloww the folder that contains a .htaccess file will be affected by the commands in said fille.

It is used primarily on Unix and Linus systems.

On Unix like systems files that are hidden start with a period.

Most people use it for redirection. You place Mod Rewrite rules in here to. You can use this file to prevent access to a site by using enviromential variables.

You can find a very short primer on it here http://biyw.com/buildwebsite/htaccess/htaccess