Wordpress Redirects. Help!

My wordpress blog has been linked like http://mysite and I want to attempt to pass that to http://www.mysite. Most people seem to have the opposite problem... they want to redirect the http to the www. Now I don't really know exactly what I'm doing here, but I'm aware that I've screwed up somehow. Google is (obviously) seeing the two as separate sites which is messing with my authorship and diluting my linkjuice.

I have the Redirect plugin but have failed to find any information on how to do a sitewide redirect in this order.

Can anyone help?

Go to settings in your wordpress dashboard and click the general link. You will find your answer there

styles81 said:

Go to settings in your wordpress dashboard and click the general link. You will find your answer there

Click to expand...

That will allow me to change it but not setup a redirect.

Imogen,

To perform a sitewide redirect you could add a directive in your .htaccess file (assuming your hosting provider supports use of this server configuration file). Do you know how to upload documents to your hosting account using a file transfer client?

If you do just put this in your .htaccess file,

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


Here is a tutorial on how to upload the file to your root domain,

http://wiki.filezilla-project.org/FileZilla_Client_Tutorial_(en)

Note you may also be able to configure this file through your hosting account cpanel.

Hope that helps you,

Shawn

I added the info to my .htaccess file and unfortunately the site then gave the error: Too many redirects. Have put the old file back.

Not sure I can win this one!

imogen said:

That will allow me to change it but not setup a redirect.

Click to expand...

You will be redirected.

Just try it!

TheContentAuthority: Thank you so much for your detailed response. Unfortunately, I tried editing the .htaccess file with the (edited) information you provided, and on a separate occasion tried to do the same thing with the Redirection plugin for WP. Both give the attached error.



builder: I tried this too and sadly this resulted in the temporary death of my website and my access to the admin panel. I had to use phpMyAdmin to change the addresses back. It's okay now, but I'm guessing that option isn't going to work here either.

I'm wondering if this is a loop issue due to WP's default canonical URLs. Wondering if I disable canonical URLs and then change the .htaccess if this might do the trick. I'm a little concerned that this will work against me in the serps instead of optimising because obviously, canonical URLs are there for a reason.

Imogen,

Sorry you are having problems. Did you have your redirect plugin disabled when you tried the .htaccess route? If not, try disabling or even uninstalling that plugin before you make changes to the .htaccess file.

Also, be sure that the .htaccess file is named appropriately on your server. Sometimes when you edit it in notepad or another program it will change the file name.

Also, try setting your permalink settings back to default before adding the redirect code to .htaccess.

Let me know if that doesn't help

Plugin wasn't installed when I tried the .htaccess redirect and the file is definitely named correctly. I tried setting the permalinks back to default and then adding the redirect but this resulted in not being able to load the site at all... it just sat there and spun, didn't even give an error.

Have you had any experience with disabling WP's default canonicals? I'd like to give that a try but I'm super nervous about the repercussions.

Edit: Found this tidbit... "You might have issues, however, if you have enabled your own form of canonical URL redirection that isn't redirecting the the URLs that WordPress thinks are the canonical version. For instance, if your blog is http://www.example.com/blog/ but you have a line in your .htaccess that redirects people to http://example.com/blog/, you're not going to be able to access your site, as the two redirects will "fight" each other in an infinite loop until the browser gives up."

That looks about right.

Have installed the Fix Multiple Redirects plugin and then again edited the .htaccess file with the information provided by TheContentAuthority.

So far so good!

Thanks to everyone who helped with this one. Will let you know if it sticks.