There is a simple way to resolve your site URLs to include the www in each address. Or drop the www from each address. Why is this important? “Redirecting requests from a non-preferred hostname is important because search engines consider URLs with and without “www” as two different websites” (woorank.com). So, if you don’t resolve your www, you are harming your SEO performance.
Getting Apache to recognize .htaccess files is a pretty easy task. All you need to do is look for where your root web directory is defined in your Apache configuration files. On Ubuntu, this location is /etc/apache/sites-enabled. Once you have located the file, just add the line “AllowOverride All” (instead of AllowOverride None) to the root directory configuration detectives.
Sometimes it is helpful, mainly to avoid broken links, to make sure your html files (with a .htm or .html extension) can parse PHP. On GoDaddy hosting, this threw me for a loop.
So, as some of you may have noticed, the handy Mod Rewrite Wizard at www.mod-rewrite-wizard.com has lapsed. So, I hunted down another little tool, which is exactly the same. Check it out at http://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/
If you do a Google search on the subject, you find that people have complaints about how GoDaddy hosting works with Wordpress’ permalinks function, many of whom claim one thing or another about how this tool works (or doesn’t work). But I’d like to clear the air on the misconceptions. So, first let me explain some of the misconceptions surrounding GoDaddy and Worpress permalinks, then explain how you can get permalinks working on your Godaddy hosted Wordpress blog.