I just found a blog post by Shirley E. Kaiser at her blog entitled Brainstorms & Raves containing an awesome collection of links and related discussion about Apache’s .htaccess.
While admittedly I write mostly for an audience of developers that use Microsoft-technologies, many of the items discussed apply to Microsoft’s IIS if you use a 3rd party tool named ISAPI Rewrite. This tools provides many of the same features of Apache’s .htaccess on IIS via the httpd.ini config file and implements most of its functionality in a manner identical to mod_rewrite on Apache. I absolutely love this tool and I’ve previously blogged about ISAPI Rewrite as well as The Importance of Well-Designed URLs, the latter of which is IMO the most important reason you absolutely need ISAPI Rewrite if you are hosting a website on IIS.
Anyway, the blog post covers topics and links to articles that:
- Explain how and why to rewrite and/or redirect URLs,
- Discuss techniques for reducing hotlinking and bandwidth theft,
- Talk about blocking bad bots and comment spammers,
- Covers regular expressions needed to match the URLs to rewrite or redirect,
- Explains Robots.txt files,
- Lists which bots are good and which are bad, and
- Covers HTTP error code.
A great resource!