301 Redirect With No WWW Using Htaccess

The first thing you will need is access to your webroot .htaccess file (located where your index page is). Some of you may not have .htaccess files or are running a single website off your server so you can do this in httpd.conf.

This is a hidden file you may have to tweak program settings to see it.

Redirecting With No www

The sample code below will use Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect (R=301) your domain to the same domain without the 'www.' subdomain.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on

  # 301 redirect to domain without 'www.'
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Redirecting To www

The sample code below will use Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect (R=301) your domain to the same domain with with the 'www.' sub domain.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on

  # 301 redirect to domain to 'www.'
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

301 Redirect With Drupal

For those of you with Drupal simply enter the lines below above the second 'chunk' of directives which wil be identical to your Drupal default .htaccess.

  # 301 redirect to domain without 'www.'
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
 
  # Rewrite current-style URLs of the form 'index.php?q=x'.
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

More Drupal SEO

To learn more about Drupal SEO techniques follow our Drupal SEO Video Tutorial which will walk you through 5 of the most popular Drupal SEO modules.

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Comments

Mar 15 2010 - 12:20pm - Compensation Claims UK

This works great , we were getting search results that led to dead links before this.

Mar 14 2010 - 8:24pm - seo

Thanks for sharing this informative stuff with us.

Dec 3 2009 - 10:29am - research papers

this one I always cant understand, thanks for explanations!

Nov 23 2009 - 5:31pm - Free Internet Kid Games

Very helpful, thank you

Nov 23 2009 - 7:59am - Oes Tsetnoc

I am thankful for such a great post with many new things to learn. Thanks, you cleared up some things for me.Just what I was googling for! Thanks for sharing!

Oct 22 2009 - 7:50am - milk thistle benefits

Now thats how you do it! I have been wondering about this for a while now.

Oct 16 2009 - 1:09am - club penguin cheats

Personally when starting a new site or if you site has little traffic it is just a matter of preference however I stick with no-www.

Aug 12 2009 - 12:52am - Term Paper

Thanks for sharing this informative stuff with us

Jun 8 2009 - 12:12pm - Tukang Nggame

thanks for sharing the useful tips

Jan 29 2009 - 3:27pm - admin

For an existing site I would suggest looking at your traffic stats and determine which is the most popular via backlinks, and go with that one, otherwise the seo is distributed between both which hurts the site. Personally when starting a new site or if you site has little traffic it is just a matter of preference however I stick with no-www

Jan 29 2009 - 5:30am - Andy, Online Florist Flowers Delivery

Thanks for the clear instructions. This is very helpful for a newbie like me.

Is there a clear preference why we should redirect to www or no-www?

Nov 22 2008 - 9:59am - frank

Thanks for the clear info, have any tips about how to do so with a multisite setup (only 1 htaccess)

thanks!