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.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • 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.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • 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

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      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
    12172
    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

            • SeoBlogs61

              Moving site from www to non www and also hosting to vps what will be the effect?

              shared hosting to vps www to non www

              Hi SEO gurus,
              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/

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoBlogs61
              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
            • trung.ngo

              Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index

              I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo
              0
            • desmond.liang

              Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?

              Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: -  No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang
              1
            • webestate

              Yoast SEO Plugin: To Index or Not to index Categories?

              Taking a poll out there......In most cases would you want to index or NOT index your category pages using the Yoast SEO plugin?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate
              0
            • pano

              Removing dashes in our URLs?

              Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano
              0
            • ContentWriterMicky

              How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?

              SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky
              0
            • barney3012

              Should you stop indexing of short lived pages?

              In my site there will be a lot of pages that have a short life span of about a week as they are items on sale, should I nofollow the links meaning the site has a fwe hundred pages or allow indexing and have thousands but then have lots of links to pages that do not exist. I would of course if allowing indexing make sure the page links does not error and sends them to a similarly relevant page but which is best for me with the SEarch Engines? I would like to have the option of loads of links with pages of loads of content but not if it is detrimental Thanks

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | barney3012
              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 - 2026 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.