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Sometimes we forget or forget to look after basic SEO topics. The other day, I caught one of my programmers allowing both capitalized URLs and lowercase URLs result in having the same destination page. Let's take Twitter as an example, since it was brought up in a Google Webmaster Help thread.
Twitter allows both capitalized and lowercase URLs return the same page. For example, both http://twitter.com/google and http://twitter.com/Google return the same exact page, content and information. But Google considers http://twitter.com/google and http://twitter.com/Google to be different pages, in many cases.
Now, Google isn't that dumb, just do a search for http://www.google.com/search?q=http://twitter.com/Google (the capitalized version) and Google will know you really want the lowercase version:
But you don't want to make Google figure this stuff out. What you should do, is make sure there is only one version, preferably the lowercase version in my opinion. If someone does go to a capitalized version, 301 that page to the lower case URL.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
Al
03/09/2009 01:36 pm
I don't think you should be hard and fast with using the lower case version though, a capitalised root or near root level folder can look and/or read very well. I completely agree with pick one though, whatever your choice is - make it consistent.
Matthew Lawson
03/09/2009 02:13 pm
Hi guys, I use Google Mini to build my sitemaps and it will cache lowercase and uppercase as separate URL so potentially if you have inconsistencies in folder names it could result in large sections of your site having duplicated pages. If the most up to date version of Google mini does than who know Google.com might do the same. So be consistent!
Ruud Kok
03/09/2009 04:32 pm
This should be a good reason for implementing the canonical tag.
Mike Vaca
03/13/2009 02:27 pm
@Ruud Kok I couldn't agree more. This is the perfect time for the new canonical tag.