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Ensuring www. is in url

Posted in Website Programming » PHP - Thursday 3rd January 2008 at 8:23PM

Alex
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How could i make sure that if the user types in:

http://website.com

Instead of what i want:

http://www.website.com or just www.website.com.
______________

And i only want it to redirect if the www. hasn't been entered.


Example:

http://google.co.uk

Click the link towards google, notice how is has a script that will redirect you to www.google.co.uk



Thank you!

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Replies (8)

Replied - Thursday 3rd January 2008 at 8:42PM [Post Link]

Alec
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Create a notepad file, call it htaccess.txt.

In it, place:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^sitename.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.sitename.com/$1 [r=301,nc]


Place it in your websites root directory, and change it from "htaccess.txt" to ".htaccess". Upload it to your server. Job done.

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Replied - Thursday 3rd January 2008 at 9:28PM [Post Link]

Alex
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Thanks SO much :D

I never thought of using htaccess, genius.

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Replied - Friday 4th January 2008 at 12:33AM [Post Link]

Will
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Be advised that forcing www onto a URL without it is stupid.

1. It redirects the user. (+time)
2. It means they're browsing from a subdomain, which means one extra request. (+time; +processing)

Just because Google does it doesn't mean it's right.

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Replied - Friday 4th January 2008 at 9:43AM [Post Link]

Alec
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Not true.

For Google, www.avengex.com and avengex.com represent two separate URLs, but for you and me it could be the same thing. It is so because you can actually have two different websites on those URLs (one www and another non-www) — it rarely happens though. When Google finds two URLs seemingly having the same/duplicate content, it indexes the one it considers the most apt.

This way it can easily miss the page you actually want it to find. It can bec aused easily by say an affiliate linking to http://avengex.com/forums/view/74/ instead of http://www.avengex.com/forums/view/74/.

The duplicate content problem can significantly harm your search engine rankings. Fortunately, canonical redirection (explained above) can solve this problem.

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Replied - Friday 4th January 2008 at 11:38AM [Post Link]

Alex
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My SSL thingy doesn't support domain.com just www.domain.com.

^ Thats why.

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Replied - Friday 4th January 2008 at 5:10PM [Post Link]

adam2z
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[QUOTE] Alec said (4th January @ 9:43am):

blah blah

and the seo industry harms my search results. fuck them.

http://no-www.org/

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Replied - Saturday 5th January 2008 at 12:32AM [Post Link]

Alec
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Yes. But untill that is universal, it is simply ignorant to ignore it.

Besides, you can rewrite everything to remove the www. thus being part of your little clan, and adhearing to my point.

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Replied - Wednesday 23rd April 2008 at 12:49AM [Post Link]

fedekun
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here its a crappy way of doing it with PHP

$abs_path = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if(preg_match("/www/i", $abs_path))
{
  $abs_path = str_replace('www.', '', $abs_path);
  header("Location: http://$abs_path");
}

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