301 redirect via .htaccess

A permanent 301 redirect in your .htaccess file lets search engines and others know that an old link has been replaced by a new one. It’s the recommended method for directing traffic from an existing page.

How permanent 301 redirect via .htaccess

On a Linux server you would use your .htaccess file to implement a 301 redirect for your pages.

Redirect individual files

To redirect individual files, like example.com/oldfile.htm to newfile.htm you can use a 301 redirect like this:

Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm /newfile.htm

To redirect one specific file to another domain such as example.com/oldfile.htm to example.net/newfile.htm:

Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm http://example.net/newfile.htm

Redirect an old domain to a new domain

If you had an old domain such as example.com, and now you decided you actually want to use example.net for the website. You could setup a 301 redirect for the entire domain, so that old links to example.com carry over.

Code in the example.com domain’s .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.net/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

Force www.  version of domain to be used

A search engine like Google would see example.com and www.example.com as essentially two separate websites. They recommend you pick one version you’d like search engines to display and using a 301 redirect is a possible option.

If you have a lot of links on the web where people are linking to your site as example.com, but you would like your visitors to instead end up at www.example.com you can force this version of your domain with these rules:

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

Force non www. version of domain to be used

If you have a lot of links on the web where people are linking to your site as www.example.com, but you would like your visitors to instead end up at example.com you can force this version of your domain with these rules:

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

Redirect all files with certain extension

To re-direct all of one type of file to another, such as example.com/file.php to example.com/file.htm

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .php$
RewriteRule ^(.*).php$ /$1.htm [R=301,L]

 

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