Redirecting all non www. requests via htaccess
For our cycle community system we have a bunch of domains all using the same codebase, running via Apache Virtual Hosts.
In order to maximise Google juice, we redirect all requests that don’t start with “www.” to the associated “www” subdomain. For example http://icyclenow.co.nz will be redirected to http://www.icyclenow.co.nz.
In order to do this simply we use htaccess and mod_rewrite and reference RewriteCond variables like so:
# Redirect all requests not starting with "www." to their www subdomain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !localhost [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !www. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%1/$1 [R=301,NC,L]The first line just makes sure we’re not on a local dev environment.
The second line checks for “www.” within the HTTP_HOST (everything after http:// and before the first /).
The third line grabs our HTTP_HOST into a capture group — ^(.*)$ matches *anything*.
The forth line is where the magic happens:
We replace the entire request (^(.*)$) with http://www. and the two capture groups.
We use %1 which references the capture group from line 3, and $1 which references the capture group from this line.
Finally we end with [R=301,NC,L]. R=301 simply means do a full page redirect using a 301 header (permanently moved - this is what maximises our Google juice), NC means no case (meaning it will match UPPER or lower case) and L means stop and redirect immediately.
Hopefully this helps someone! More useful tips here.
- James
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