Resolve Canonical URL Looping in Apache

Interesting… I’ve come in contact with the canonical redirect issue before. Mostly it’s an issue of Apache 1.3 and redirecting the no-www version of a website to the www version (Apache 2.0, I’ve noticed, does a much better job of not getting caught in the loop), but redirecting index.php to root when Apache calls index.php is somewhat of a problem. Luckily, Oatmeal of SEOmoz has your solution:

1. Copy index.php to another filename that is not set as a DirectoryIndex by apache, for this example we’ll be using sitehome.php
2. Create an apache DirectoryIndex directive for your document root.
   Set it to sitehome.php. Do not set the directive on a server-wide level
   otherwise it may cause problems with other folders that still need to
   use index.php as a directory index.
   Put this in an .htaccess file in your document root: DirectoryIndex sitehome.php Or if you aren’t using per-directory context files, put this in your httpd.conf
   <Directory /your/document/root/examplesite.com/>
  DirectoryIndex sitehome.php
</Directory>
3. Clear out the contents of your original index.php file. Insert this line of code:
   <? header("Location: http://www.example.com"); ?>