Redirect an Index page to /

www.mydomain.com/index.html and www.mydomain.com/ are not the same URL from a search engine perspective. If someone adds the index.html while typing in your domain they should be redirected to your folder name which ends in a slash (www.mydomain.com/) Once again, htaccess comes to the rescue.

Using a RewriteRule will alleviate the problem. The solution below will take effect for ALL subdirectories. To redirect www.mydomain.com/index.html to www.mydomain.com/ do the following:

In an existing .htaccess file or a new .htaccess file add the following code:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
#
# redirect index.htm and index.html to / (do this before non-www to www)
#
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html?$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace mydomain with the domain you want to redirect. r=301 means redirect the client and send a status code of 301. This will redirect index.html AND index.htm to the root directory /.

 For example, if you typed in www.mydomain.com/products/index.htm you will be redirected to www.mydomain.com/products/ which is what we want.

If you also want index.php redirected:

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

Since the RewriteCond and RewriteRule use pattern-matching, index.ph will also be matched (but I wouldn't worry about it).

Redirect Solution

The following htaccess code will take care of www vs. non-www and redirect index.html or index.htm to /. Note the index.html redirection to www.mydomain.com/ is done before non-www to www redirection.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
#
# redirect index.htm and index.html to / (do this before non-www to www)
#
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html?$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#
# redirect mydomain.com -> www.mydomain.com
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]