.htaccess

If you want to redirect all non-www requests to your site to the www version, all you need to do is add the following code to your .htaccess file:
in your .htaccess file

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

This will redirect any requests to http://my-domain.com to http://www.my-domain.com. There are several benefits from doing that:

* It will avoid duplicate content in Google
* It will avoid the possibility of split page rank and/or split link popularity (inbound links).
* It’s nicer, and more consistent.

Note that if your site has already been indexed by Google without the www, this might cause unwanted side effects, like lost of PR. I don’t think this would happen, or in any case it would be a temporary issue (we are doing a permanent redirect, 301, so Google should transfer all rankings to the www version). But anyway, use at your own risk!

Something nice about the code above is that you can use it for any website, since it doesn’t include the actual domain name.
Redirecting www to non-www

If you want to do the opposite, the code is very similar:
in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^my-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://my-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In this case we are explicitly typing the domain name. I’m sure it’s possible to do it in a generic way, but I haven’t had the time to work one out and test it. So remember to change ‘my-domain’ with your domain name! More >

You might be aware of mod_rewrite rule and .htaccess file if you are using wordpress as your Blogging platform, .htaccess is the apache’s default directory level configuration files which can be used to password protect and redirect requests. Webmasters need to give special attentions to .htaccess on apache webserver as its very difficult to enforce all policies using just httpd.conf file. More >

For a website that has URLs that end with a slash (/), it’s a good practice to ensure that all url links been parsed by the web server ended with trailing slash, even if visitors forget to enter the ending slash. This avoid visitors been served with 404 Page Not Found or Page Cannot be Displayed error as some webservers treat links without trailing slash as a file name instead of directory, and thus unable to locate the documents. It also eliminates the possibility that both pages with same content, one with slash at the end and another without, been viewed by search engines as duplicate content.

As an example, all hits to http://www.mydigitallife.info/contact should be redirect to http://www.mydigitallife.info/contact/. More >