How to redirect all non-www pages to www at Bluehost
The non-www and www pages used to be a critical treat to SEO works as Google sees it as two different pages and assign two different page rank to the same page.
Generally, the problem has now been solved within Google (by sorting out the issue in their algorithm and introducing Google Webmaster Tools).
Nevertheless, it is more professional to have a standardized website URL thus redirecting non-www pages to www is still necessary.
Redirect with .htaccess files at Bluehost
One good thing about hosting with Bluehost is that Bluehost users are allowed to access (create/modify/delete) the .htaccess files at root. Hence, redirecting all non-www web pages to www counterpart is easy.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Create or locate your .htaccess file
A .htaccess file is an Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files. To redirect your non-www pages, you will first need to create or locate the .htaccess file. If it doesn’t exist, create it on your Bluehost root (yes, this means public_html in Bluehost); if it exist, open it with wordpad or any other text editing software.
2. Add the following lines to your .htaccess file
Replacing ‘example.com’ with your website domain, copy and paste the lines below to your .htaccess file. Save and replace the original file at your root folder and you’re now done.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
To test, simply type in the non-www URL of your website to your Internet browser and see your web URL being redirect to the www.
