Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Well, after trying out all 3 of the options i posted, none worked and one threw a server error.

BUT, alas... I found the correct way to do it:

<code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</code>

This is the correct way to forward all non www requests to www.yoursite.com

No need to put your domain name, simply add the code above to a .htaccess file on your server and viola!

If someone wants to redirect all www to non www then the code would be:
```

> ```
> ```
> <code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">RewriteEngine On
> RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^my-domain\.com$ [NC]
> RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://my-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]</code>
> ``` 
> ```

```
```
<code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">and of course replace the my-domain with your domain ;)</code>
``` 
```

Thanks for the reply Casey!

I'm trying to redirect non www to www. and I'm on a dedicated server running apache. For my HTML5 pages, what should my HTACCESS file look like.

My ultimate goal is to be SEO optimized. Any other settings that will help my sites would be appreciated

I have searched google for 'how to setup .htaccess file' and it seems that every website has some variation. For example:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

On SEOMOZ someone posted this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com [NC]

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

On yet another website, I found this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^your-site.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your-site.com/$1 [L,R=301]

As you can see there are slight differences.

Which one do I use? I'm on Apache CentOS and I have HTML5 websites and several Joomla! wesites. Would the HTACCESS File be different for both?