By Steady on

Hello Everyone,

I have just been reading up on seo and drupal and it was recommended to redirect non-www to www or vice-versa. Just don't keep both.

I am a little confused by the default .htaccess file as it seems to have some differing characters in the relevant lines in the file as compared to other examples I found on google.

Also, this particular site is a .co.uk so here's what I have in the file if I follow the drupal comments:

Lets' assume the website is called: www.joebloggs.co.uk

Here's the original section in the .htaccess file after the drupal install:

# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
# (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#

Here is my amended section in the .htaccess file:

# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
# (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^joebloggs\.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.joebloggs.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
#

What is confusing me is that in the first line there is a back slash between the joebloggs and the .co.uk

After doing some googling, none of the other examples I found had this back slash between the joebloggs and the .co.uk in the first line.

I am a complete beginner regarding .htaccess files and I want to make sure I have done the correct thing. I would kick myself I I got such an important thing wrong.

Please help.

If it is correct, a brief clarification what this back slash means, would be fantastic.

Thank you,
Sam

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Mark Theunissen’s picture

Mark Theunissen commented

You should have the following:

^joebloggs\.co\.uk$

The backslash is an escape character in the regular expression. Without the slash, the dot will match any character, so I guess technically it will still work, but for the sake of being correct, put in the \. which only matches a dot....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Hope that helps!

Mark Theunissen’s picture

Mark Theunissen commented

p.s. just so you know, the ^ matches the beginning, and the $ matches the end of the string.

Steady’s picture

Steady commented

Mark,

Thank you for your very swift and extremely clear reply!!!

My headache has gone :-)

Cheers,
Sam

Mark Theunissen’s picture

Mark Theunissen commented

No problem ;)

BassPlaya’s picture

BassPlaya commented

basically, if a user types in http://joebloggs.co.uk then he doesn't find the page while if you type joebloggs.co.uk he changes to the correct path..

I tried the following below but it doesn't work:

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^http\:\/\/joebloggs\.co\.uk$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.joebloggs.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^joebloggs\.co\.uk$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.joebloggs.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

any suggestions on how to do this?

Authentically,
BassPlaya

lpalgarvio’s picture

lpalgarvio commented

hey
here's some .htaccess code

redirect domain.tld to www.domain.tld, but not other subdomains (like site2.domain.tld):

  # Redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !\.([a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6})$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

redirect www.domain.tld to domain.tld, but not other subdomains (like site2.domain.tld):

  # Redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !\.([a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6})$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

based on D7 .htaccess with inclusion of no other subdomains condition

Luís Pedro Algarvio
Site Reliability / DevOps Engineer.
Free and Open Source Software advocate.
Passionate about life and work.
lp.algarvio.org

BeaPower’s picture

BeaPower commented

THanks this worked!

selva8187’s picture

selva8187 commented

Thanks it's worked for me

DewanCodes’s picture

DewanCodes commented

# adapt and uncomment the following:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Replace your domain with "example.com" above.

TechyTechy’s picture

TechyTechy commented 
Just use the below code. You can even redirect all users to HTTPS. Simply replace http with https.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.abc.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Check here for more conditions.