Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash
-
i've to give some information about my website Environment
1. i have static webpage in the root.
2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/
3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
folder.i want to
- www to non on all URLs
- Remove index.html from url
- Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
without .html extension - Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash
- Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash
Some examples
domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/
domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/
domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/
domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/
My code in ROOT htaccess is
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /#removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L]#www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]#html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]#index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>The above code do
1. redirect www to non-www
2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
3. Remove index.html
4. Remove all .html
5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end -
#index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]hi anyone please help I use this code but now getting 404 error. please help.
i also remove this code again but still same issue.
-
Hi Tom,
thanks for your reply.
i have some problems
the above code doesn't
1 - Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash
so it should be http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles/ instead of http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles
2 - Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash
-
Hey NeatIT!
I see you have a working solution there. Did you have a specific question about the setup?
I did notice that your setup cane sometimes result in chaining 301 redirects, which is one area for possible improvement.
Let me know how we can help!

Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving site from www to non www and also hosting to vps what will be the effect?
Hi SEO gurus,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoBlogs61
I am trying to move my site from shared hosting to VPS hosting and also moving from www to non www version.
What is the best possible way to avoid any issue and without losing the backlinks.
Is it good or bad to do? URL: https://buylikesservices.com/0 -
Can you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
Whats the best way to remove search indexed pages on magento?
A new client ( aqmp.com.br/ )call me yestarday and she told me since they moved on magento they droped down more than US$ 20.000 in sales revenue ( monthly)... I´ve just checked the webmaster tool and I´ve just discovered the number of crawled pages went from 3.260 to 75.000 since magento started... magento is creating lots of pages with queries like search and filters. Example: http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?mode=grid http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?dir=desc&order=name Add a instruction on robots.txt is the best way to remove unnecessary pages of the search engine?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google. It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index. I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Should I remove the ?replytocom variables in wordpress?
I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it. Here's the site if you need to see it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Trailing Slash: Lost in Redirection?
Question here, but first the lead in. As you all know, 301 redirects don't pass on 100% of link juice. I've set up my site using htaccess to redirect all non-ww to www and redirect all URLs to have a trailing slash. FYI, the preferred domain is selected in WMT and canonical URLs appear in the head section of all pages. So now what happens when sites that link to mine don't include either the www or the trailing slash, which is actually quite common? Of course, asking the site own to correct the link is ideal, but that's not always possible. So if thousands of links on external sites are linking to http://www.site.com instead of http://www.site.com/, won't lots of link juice get lost in redirection? I can't think of anything more I can do to the URLs to reduce duplicate content and juice dilution. Thoughts? Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kwoolf0