ok, so I figured it out after 1 week of digging. I hope others find this post useful
The big changes I made are different then what was suggest by the EE team.
So I added index.php to the General Config on EE “Name of your site’s index page” = index.php.
Then I added “DirectoryIndex index.php” to my .htaccess
Then I added a command to add a slash to the end of any url
And that is it. Completely works fine now, no errors on either http://www.domain.com or domain.com. Google Fetch is happy and that makes me happy.
So here is my .htaccess file…if you use this be sure to remove http://www.domain.com and use your own domain, also if you are not redirecting to www you will have to use domain.com.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
DirectoryIndex index.php
#add slash to end URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]
#www to non-www
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)
# RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{http_host}/$1 [R=301,L]
#non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.(.*)
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{http_host}/$1 [R=301,L]
# Removes Index.php
RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]
I hope this helps someone else out there because I was so frustrated with this and not much help out there. I found a few crumbs here and there that finally lead me to this working fix. Although not what EE wants.