Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

In my last post I covered some of the most common applications of .htaccess files that we use at Customer Street. In this post I will be looking at some of the lesser known .htaccess applications: IP address blocking, blocking unwanted bots and blocking site scrapers.

Blocking IP Addresses From Your Site

From time to time you may want to block certain users from your site. There are many reasons why this would be useful. Maybe you want to block all IP addresses external to your target country or maybe you have a visitor to your site that keeps stealing content. The possibilities are vast.

The .htaccess file has a variety of purposes and all SEOs should have a basic knowledge of these. In this post I’m going to tell you how to create an .htaccess file and how to setup two of the most frequently used .htaccess features – 301 redirects and custom 404 error pages.

Creating an .htaccess file

Firstly, a few points about the .htaccess file:

The Arrival of Google

Just before the turn of the century Google announced its arrival to the online community. In the years following Google consistently expanded to become the largest search engine in the world. As their market share grew search engine optimisers started to pay more and more attention to the Google algorithm and what it takes to be at the top of the new “number one” search engine.

EVERY search engines primary goal is to provide the best quality, most relevant search results possible and the way each search engine does this varies considerably. As most of you know Google has successfully established itself as the search engine of choice and one of the key aspects in the way Google’s decides its search results is website cross linking.