Updates on .htaccess
Thu, 22 February, 2007 – 2:47 pm
I've made further changes to my .htaccess file to redirect all of the old feeds through to my Feed Burner feeds. The numbers FB's reporting look pitiful compared the visitors I actually get, plus it's a little less bandwidth used by my site!
I also did a run through my 404's on my stats and updated what I could using a 301 or 410 to try and ensure less people got a 404 page. And the final task was to update my referral spam list which checks on the referrer and if it's on the list it gets a 403 returned and doesn't show up in my stats.
Why bother? Well it keeps my stats looking tidier and more accurate. I know I can't stop a lot of the bots or programs that are trying to spam this site as there are too many options to consider. However this way my referral list is tidier, and with the 404's it means that my visitors have less chance of seeing a 404 error plus the search engine spiders won't be visiting pages that don't exist, afterall if a human is going there a spider can too. Google's Sitemaps, now known as Webmaster Central, also offers you a list of 404 errors their googlebot encounters, which again is a good list to run through and fix where you can.
It's a bit like spring cleaning your site, tying up loose ends and leaving it neater for a while 
If anyone has any problems with their feed (they'll probably not see this message!) let me know.
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