Joomla .htaccess - redirect non-www to www

Tweet

You probably noticed that if you type in boolcast.com or www.boolcast.com in your browser you will get to the same place. Wonder what the difference is? The answer is - there is not difference, for a human at least. This is just a preference that helps you improve search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines treat non-www and www domains as different entities for indexing. If you want your search engine ranking to go up at a higher rate you must decide on how you want your domain to appear, www or non-www. If you will not specify preferred domain your search rank will get split between non-www and www, putting you lower in the search results.

Joomla is the best CMS. It has basic SEO that does a good job, if you want to keep things simple and do not want to use third party components like sh404SEF, here is what you have to do two things:

1. Decide on domain preference www or non-www
2. Modify .htaccess file (APACHE only) to redirect the traffic to proper domain

Here is what you have to add to .htaccess file to enabled the forwarding from non-www to www

If you are not using Joomla SEO with .htaccess enabled, create a new .htaccess file in your site root and add following content to it.

RewriteEngine On
<ol> </ol>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you are using Joomla SEO with .htaccess enabled add these lines of code above "Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section" 

########## Start - Rewrite non-www to www#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
########### End - Rewrite non-www to www

You can download complete htaccess file below

Joomla htaccess (with preferred domain) Version:1.0
GNU/GPL    This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it    Joomla 1.5  1.44 KB