Add a www redirect: Avoid Google indexing your website twice

Step 1: The code

Copy this code into your chosen text editor and change the "yourwebsite" reference to what ever website URL you are referencing.

# Redirect non-www urls to www
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourwebsite\.co.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Step 2: Saving the file (a special way)

Ok so you have the code in place in your chosen text editor, you canot simple save it as you usually would as this would then prefix the extension .txt to the file your saving (so it ends up being .htaccess.txt) ...That would then make the file unoperational for the Linux server.

What you need to do is make sure SAVE AS is selected and then select ALL FILES then simple type in .htaccess (remember the period in front of the htaccess).

Step 3: Uploading the file (a special way)

ok so you sucessfully saved the file your now ready to upload it to the websites hosting server...whats important here is that in your chosen FTP software that you select ASCII as the uploading type for this file....very important!

You should be uploading this file to the root directory of your website...the way it works is that you could potentially have a different .htaccess file in different directories on your website hosting server which can perform so many different things...but for "sitewide" operation you would need to make sure its uploaded to the root for your website.

I use SmartFTP for uploading to my hosting servers and here is a screenshot of where to select ASCII for the uploading of the .HTACCESS file.

Step 1: Use this to add www to the URL

Add this code to the top of everypage...or copy it to a new page save it using the .php file extension and then use a php include to include it to what ever pages you want...or if required for site wide integration then add this code to your dreamweaver template or WebAssist Framwork Builder template.

//make sure www is in the url
if(strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'], 'www.') === false) {
 $redirect = ((!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS'])) ? 'https://' : 'http://') . 'www.' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
 header('Location: ' . $redirect);
}

Step 2: Use this to remove the www

Add this code to the top of everypage...or copy it to a new page save it using the .php file extension and then use a php include to include it to what ever pages you want...or if required for site wide integration then add this code to your dreamweaver template or WebAssist Framwork Builder template.

//remove www from the url and redirect only if www is in the url
if(strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'], 'www.') === 0) {
 $redirect = (!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) ? 'https://' : 'http://') . substr($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'],4) . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
 header('Location: ' . $redirect);
 die();
}