Working on many projects I am constantly facing the task of changing or (more often) creating .htaccess file. There is no reason to mention once again that its installment is very important for SEO purposes, but some people are not still aware of it.

At first it was like a nightmare: so many info on the Internet that I could not decide what advice to follow. .htaccess description on Apache’s official site is very nice but not for optimizers – rather for tech-gurus. Then I followed the experience of other sites, and tried to implement their examples on my projects. A better result but still unsatisfied – too many variants as many people there are.

And finally I’ve found (I believe) the core variant accessible for all. Try to install it on your server and you must forget about 301 redirect.

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

- this part should redirect all non-www requests to www.nokeywordinurl.com

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.php?
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php?$ http://www.nokeywordinurl.com/$1 [R=301,L]

- and this one redirects your index.php (in my example) to www.nokeywordinurl.com/ . In case you have index.html – just change php to html or whatever you have.

It’s the second round of indexing “in-contest” pages by the search engines and it’s time to frame some kind of comparison table.

First of all, I’d like to describe the core principles the table will be based on.

1. The key phrase will be searched for without using quotation marks, i.e. I’ll put the raw phrase -globalwarming awareness2007- into the search bar.
   Why? ‘Cause, let’s imagine our term is a brand name (as some guys for the contest tried to imagine) and put ourselves in an average man’s place. Those who search for “adidas shoes” will type in just adidas shoes – no marks, no special signs for a more narrower search results. I doubt more than 20-30 percent of search engines users make use of these techniques. That is why it’s our choice.
2. The table will contain the data about back links to the page.
   Essential thing for PR boost and, consequently – better results in SERPs.
3. Page Rank.
   Not too helpful at the moment as all the “clean” sites participating have domain names registered on the 15th of January – nice part of the contest. I will be waiting for the results of Page Rank update with a more exited feeling – who will get the highest PR? – Time will show.
4. Keyword density.
   Will be monitored throughout the page: body text, meta keywords, meta description,
   H1 text, all link texts, IMG alt attributes, overall amount compared to the number of all the words on the page.
5. And, for sure – the position of the page in Google, Yahoo!, MSN.
   In plain words – the aim of any search engine optimization process. This contest is not an exception!
6. All the rest will be added later – as it requires more spare time (I’m in lack of).

So, here are the results we can see on the SERPs 18.01.07.
***I’m working on this thing from Belarus, i.e. the results can be different due to the differences of search engine data centers results.

Top 10 Google results (as they appear on my screen):

1. www.global-warming-awareness2007.org/
2. globalwarmingawareness2007.org.uk/
   
3. www.championcheap.com/
4. www.globalwarmingawareness2007contest.com/
5. www.e-globalwarming-awareness2007.com/
6. www.seoworldchampionship.com/globalwarmingawareness2007.asp
7. www.seoworldchampionship.com/
8. www.pink-globalwarming-awareness2007.com/
9. www.globalwarmingawareness2007.be/
10. www.globalwarming-awareness2007.com/

Top 10 Yahoo! results (as they appear on my screen):

1. www.global-pink-hat-warming.org.uk
2. del.icio.us/tag/globalwarming
3. www.svend.com/globalwarming-awareness2007.htm
4. earth-globalwarming-awareness2007.com
5. www.championcheap.com
6. api.moreover.com/ping
7. www.seoworldchampionship.com
8. www.kevinjb.com
9. www.bookner.com
10. www.globalawareness.biz

Top 10 MSN results (as they appear on my screen):

1. itsglobalwarmingawareness2007.blogspot.com
2. globawarmingawareness.blogspot.com
3. www.2007globalwarming.com
4. www.globalwarmingawarenessblog.com
5. www.globalwarming–awareness2007.info
6. www.jerkasmarknad.com/contest/archives/3
7. globalwarmingxawareness2007.com
8. www.2007globalwarmingawareness.co.uk
9. globalwarmingawareness07.spaces.live.com/ friends
10. www.ioeilweb.com/libri

High competition: 56.400 results in Google, 270 in MSN and 613 in Yahoo!. Google is the “target-leader” at the moment. The further info will be published a bit later (I need time to get the info:))

Here I am going to publish the reports on sites’ positions in major search engines. It’s not still clear for me how, but I will try to make the comparison table sufficient and readable.