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
-
Changing Url Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
Should I disable the indexing of tags in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a client that is publishing 7 or 8 news articles and posts each month. I am optimising selected posts and I have found that they have been adding a lot of tags (almost like using hashtags) . There are currently 29 posts but already 55 tags, each of which has its own archive page, and all of which are added to the site map to be indexed (https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/sitemap_index.xml). I came across an article (https://crunchify.com/better-dont-use-wordpress-tags/) that suggested that tags add no value to SEO ranking, and as a consequence Wordpress tags should not be indexed or included in the sitemap. I haven't been able to find much more reliable information on this topic, so my question is - should I get rid of the tags from this website and make the focus pages, posts and categories (redirecting existing tag pages back to the site home page)? It is a relatively new websites and I am conscious of the fact that category and tag archive pages already substantially outnumber actual content pages (posts and news) - I guess this isn't optimal. I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks wMfojBf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCN-SBWD0 -
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 -
Htaccess maximum size?
Hello all, The company that develops our website recently contacted and asked me if we could remove a large amount of URL rewrites. I've described a few factors and my main questions below. Some information: One year ago we did a large migration. We went from 27 websites to one main website. We have got about 2000 rewrites in the htaccess file. And the file is 208kb. A lot of links from our old domains still have incoming traffic which are handled by the rewrite rules mentioned above. Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPA
The company that develops our website said that the htaccess file is too large and is causing or could be causing us website performance issues. They have asked us to remove URL rewrites.
My question is:
a) How many rewrites is too much?
b) Is the filesize of the htaccess of any importance or is it just the amount of rewrites in the file?
c) Could we solve any potential server/website performance issues due to a large htaccess file in any other way? Increasing some values like 'post_max_size' or by any other solutions handled serverside? I do not have a lot of knowledge of htaccess rules but I've seen websites that handled over a million of rewrite rules. This is why I'm having doubts on whether removing URL rewrites is the only solution and possibly not the best solution for us. Hopefully you can help me any further and with the best way to proceed without losing traffic or causing 404 pages. Thanks in advance!
Iordache Voicu0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing
This search - site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix gives me this result from Google: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'. When I click to see it I get: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended. I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice. Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls? And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.0 -
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 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0