Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. 6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash

    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

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    4
    12103
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • NeatIT
      NeatIT last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • roynguyen
        roynguyen last edited by

        #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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • NeatIT
          NeatIT @Tom-Anthony last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Tom-Anthony
            Tom-Anthony last edited by

            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! 🙂

            NeatIT 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • Asmi-Ta

              Staging website got indexed by google

              indexing crawling noindex

              Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta
              0
            • TheDude

              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 | | TheDude
              0
            • RobAus

              Question about Indexing of /?limit=all

              Hi, i've got your SEO Suite Ultimate installed on my site (www.customlogocases.com). I've got a relatively new magento site (around 1 year). We have recently been doing some pr/seo for the category pages, for example /custom-ipad-cases/ But when I search on google, it seems that google has indexed the /custom-ipad-cases/?limit=all This /?limit=all page is one without any links, and only has a PA of 1. Whereas the standard /custom-ipad-cases/ without the /? query has a much higher pa of 20, and a couple of links pointing towards it. So therefore I would want this particular page to be the one that google indexes. And along the same logic, this page really should be able to achieve higher rankings than the /?limit=all page. Is my thinking here correct? Should I disallow all the /? now, even though these are the ones that are indexed, and the others currently are not. I'd be happy to take the hit while it figures it out, because the higher PA pages are what I ultimately am getting links to... Thoughts?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobAus
              0
            • Sika22

              PDF or HTML Page?

              One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page.  The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents.  My thoughts were why not make it a pdf?  Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page?  If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well?  The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika22
              0
            • khi5

              Infinite Scrolling: how to index all pictures

              I have a page where I want to upload 20 pictures that are in a slideshow. Idea is that pictures will only load when users scroll down the page (otherwise too heavy loading). I see documentation on how to make this work and ensure search engines index all content. However, I do not see any documentation how to make this work for 20 pictures in a slideshow. It seems impossible to get a search engines to index all such pictures, when it shows only as users scroll down a page. This is documentation I am already familiar with, and which does not address my issue:
              http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload http://luis-almeida.github.io/unveil/ thank you

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
              0
            • Dillman

              How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??

              I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY?  and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference.  I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/');  to $redirect_url = home_url('');       nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file  (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) :   RewriteEngine on
              RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
              RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
              RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
              0
            • BeytzNet

              Should I remove Meta Keywords tags?

              Hi, Do you recommend removing Meta Keywords or is there "nothing to lose" with having them? Thanks

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
              0
            • seoppc2012

              Does Google index url with hashtags?

              We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc2012
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.