How do I hide a 301 redirect from my root domain?

Question

I was analyzing my webpage SEO using an online tool where I saw that my HTTP status for my root domain name www.example.com was resulting in a 301 redirect to www.example.com/index.html.

I would much rather have my root domain returning a 200 result instead- but I set up my 301 redirects a long time ago and now I am not sure how to alter my code to resolve this. I have noticed my website's main root domain disappearing from the SERPs (being replaced, in most cases, with a sub domain page) and I am afraid that this 301 redirect may be affecting my root domain's ability to rank.

My .htaccess file begins with this code:

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Followed by my individual redirects.

My index.html page includes the code:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com">  

And I have Google webmaster tools set up to have any instances of non-www pages show up as their www version instead.

Is any of this code redundant? What should I change in order to get a HTTP 200 result for my root?

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^$ /index.html [L]

This will tell Apache to treat the hit to example.com as a hit to example.com/index.html without redirecting (URL stays the same).

The code you already have (last 2 lines) tells Apache to redirect not www-prefixed URL to one with www in front (e.g. http://example.com/somepage.html => http://www.example.com/somepage.html).