Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Save 36% now!
      Moz Pro

      Save 36% now!

      Sign up
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Save 36% now!
      Moz Pro

      Save 36% now!

      Sign up
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • My Q&A
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. 6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    4
    12145
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • NeatIT
      NeatIT last edited by

      i've to give some information about my website Environment

      1. i have static webpage in the root.

      2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/

      3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
      folder.

      i want to

      • www to non on all URLs
      • Remove index.html from url
      • Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
        without .html extension
      • Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash
      • Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash

      Some examples

      domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/

      domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/

      domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/

      domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/

      My code in ROOT htaccess is

      <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews

      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteBase /

      #removing trailing slash
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L]

      #www to non
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
      RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

      #html
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]

      #index redirect
      RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
      RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
      RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
      RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

      The above code do

      1. redirect www to non-www
      2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
      3. Remove index.html
      4. Remove all .html
      5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • roynguyen
        roynguyen last edited by

        #index redirect
        RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
        RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
        RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
        RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

        hi anyone please help I use this code but now getting 404 error. please help.

        i also remove this code again but still same issue.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • NeatIT
          NeatIT @Tom-Anthony last edited by

          Hi Tom,

          thanks for your reply.

          i have some problems

          the above code doesn't

          1 - Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash

          so it should be http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles/ instead of http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles

          2 - Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Tom-Anthony
            Tom-Anthony last edited by

            Hey NeatIT!

            I see you have a working solution there. Did you have a specific question about the setup?

            I did notice that your setup cane sometimes result in chaining 301 redirects, which is one area for possible improvement.

            Let me know how we can help! 🙂

            NeatIT 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Browse Questions

            Explore more categories

            • Moz Tools

              Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

            • SEO Tactics

              Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

            • Community

              Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

            • Digital Marketing

              Chat about tactics outside of SEO

            • Research & Trends

              Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

            • Support

              Connect on product support and feature requests.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • TheDude

              URL Rewriting Best Practices

              Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude
              0
            • ozil

              How to do Country specific indexing ?

              We are a business that operate in South East Asian countries and have medical professionals listed in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. When I go to Google Philippines and check I can see indexing of pages from all countries and no Philippines pages. Philippines is where we launched recently. How can I tell Google Philippines to give more priority to pages from Philippines and not from other countries Can someone help?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozil
              0
            • morg45454

              Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?

              my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | morg45454
              0
            • IrvCo_Interactive

              301s being indexed

              A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive
              0
            • WebbyNabler

              Duplicate Content From Indexing of non- File Extension Page

              Google somehow has indexed a page of mine without the .html extension.  so they indexed  www.samplepage.com/page, so I am showing duplicate content because Google also see's  www.samplepage.com/page.html   How can I force google or bing or whoever to only index and see the page including the .html extension?  I know people are saying not to use the file extension on pages, but I want to, so please anybody...HELP!!!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler
              0
            • JohnPeters

              Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?

              Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its  basic question 😞

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
              0
            • BeTheBoss

              Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index

              6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google. It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index. I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss
              0
            • ScottBaxterWW

              De-indexed Link Directory

              Howdy Guys, I'm currently working through our 4th reconsideration request and just have a couple of questions. Using Link Detox (www.linkresearchtools.com) new tool they have flagged up a 64 links that are Toxic and should be removed. After analysing them further alot / most of them are link directories that have now been de-indexed by Google. Do you think we should still ask for them to be removed or is this a pointless exercise as the links has already been removed because its been de-indexed. Would like your views on this guys.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy