Why FollowSymLinks and other questions

[sKunKbad]

I did a mod rewrite for a new program I have on my site, and I just want to know more about what I am doing. I was successful, but have questions:

 

1) What is FollowSymLinks, and what is the difference between Options FollowSymLinks and Options +FollowSymLinks. I had to use Options FollowSymLinks to get my rewrite to work. It's a godaddy server so maybe that means something.

 

2) Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews works instead of Options FollowSymLinks, but if -Multiviews is removed, the plus sign in front of FollowSymLinks has to be removed for the rewrite to work. So what is with the plus sign, and what is -Multiviews?

 

Is there any need to use [R=301,L] for a standard rewrite rule? Will I be penalized by search engines for not supplying the 301 redirect info? Will I have any other problems without including it?

 

I have seen the official apache documentation, but it is too uberGeek for me to understand. Is there a dummies guide to this anywhere? Rewrites for boneheads? I'm no stranger to regex, so what I'm looking for is the Options info, etc.

 

In case anyone else needs a rewrite on a godaddy server, here is what I used:

Options FollowSymLinks
rewriteEngine on
rewriteRule ^tips/([0-9]+).php5 /test/tips.php5?tip=$1 [NC]