"translation" of code in htaccess file

[momof4]

Hi everyone!

I am a newbie to the whole SEO and html thing and I am trying to get a better understanding of the "behind the scenes" part of my website. I hope I can find someone here who can translate a piece of code for me that I have in my htaccess file:

Options -Multiviews
Options +FollowSymLinks
rewritecond $1 !^(index.php|public|tmp|robots.txt|template.html|favicon.ico|images|css|uploads)
rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
rewriterule ^(.*)$ index.php?link=$1 [NC,L,QSA]

I know that something is getting redirected to the index file, but what (or when) exactly? Does the word "robots"mean that search engine crawlers are getting redirected here? And is this good or bad (in terms of  SEO)? Or is this redirecting people who try to get to my robots/ template or image files??

Thanks in advance for any answers!

[momof4]

Hi lynnp!

Thanks for explaining! That was very helpful.

[LynnPatchett]

It should be redirecting to index.php as long as a number of conditions are met:

rewritecond $1 !^(index.php|public|tmp|robots.txt|template.html|favicon.ico|images|css|uploads)
As long as the requested url does not start with one of: index.php, public, tmp, robots.txt, template.html, favicon.ico, imagesloss, uploads and,

rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
As long as the requested url is not an existing file or directory

Then:
rewriterule ^(.*)$ index.php?link=$1 [NC,L,QSA]
Rewrite the url to index.php?link=REQUESTED-URL (along with any other url variables) and stop processing

So you should be seeing urls something like index.php?link=page.php or similar if the conditions above are met.
robots.txt is not being redirected since it is being specifically excluded in the first line.

Think I got that right, hope it makes sense!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

As far as I can tell from checking this snippet it is NOT redirecting traffic to your index.php file and public/tmp/ and a couple of more directories. I'm not that familiar with Apache environments, somehow more Nginx so I can't help you with the other three lines.