301 redirections

I have both .com and .net tlds about a domain name i want to redirect .net to the .com name as 301. can anyone explain how to do it ?

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create a file named .htaccess and place it in the main root directory of the .net domain and put the following code in the file:

where mydomain.com is your .com domain

Is there an advantage to doing 301 redirects versus other options? I've not used them before and would like to know more about them.

Can we do this in Cpanel without editing the .htaccess file ?

@aqgiles : I read somewhere that if you want to direct bunch of domains towards single domain Google prefers this way.

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