Problem with 301 redirect

Edited my .htaccess file and now my WWW.example.com "isn't found"

[vaulter]

I've been searching the internet for some time now trying to find some solid instructions on 301 redirects. I pasted the following into my .htaccess file in an attempt to redirect the non-www, and www.example.com/index.html versions to www.example.html:

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

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]


The redirects worked, but Chrome and Firefox now tell me that www.example.com is "not found"

Help?!

[g1smd]

The index redirect does not redirect for index requests in folders, only the root.

The domain canonicalisation redirect does not fix non-canonical requests with a port number.

Try:

# Externally redirect only direct client requests for */index.php
# and */index.html and */index.htm to URL ending with slash.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(html?|php)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index.(html?|php)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# Externally redirect to canonicalize the domain name if a non-canonical
# hostname is requested, in order to prevent duplicate-content problems

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

[vaulter]

Thanks g1smd! That worked like a charm. Any advice on the mod rewrite that gets rid of the ".html" file extension from each file on the site?

[g1smd]

The most major point is that

mod_rewrite

cannot "get rid of" anything.

The first step is to link to the URLs that you want users to "see" and "use" by altering the links on the pages of your site. It is those links that define the URLs within your site.

The job of

mod_rewrite

is to use the RegEx pattern matching such that one rule matches the current request and rewrites that request to fetch content from elsewhere inside the server.

That is,

mod_rewrite

translates or "rewrites" an incoming URL request into a non-default internal server location, as compared to that suggested by the path part of the requested URL.

RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)$ /$1.html [L]

In this case, an incoming request for an extensionless URL is rewritten to fetch content from a file with the .html extension.

That is exactly backwards to most people's perception of what

mod_rewrite

does.



However, If you don't take extra steps to prevent it happening, people will still be able to also access your content with the .html extension present on the end of their URL request.

That can be taken care of with a redirect:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/.])+\.html?(\?[^\ ]+)?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)\.html?$ http://www.example.com/$1? [R=301,L]

The ".html to extensionless" redirect goes ahead of your standard "non-www to www" redirect.

All of your redirects go ahead of the internal rewrite code.