Moderator Egol pointed me to an excellent SEO Chat thread named URL Casing. The question is, if I had a domain name such as www.bigbluepineapplechair.com and you wanted to tell people to go to www.BigBluePineappleChair.com to make it easier to read, then would that affect your link building campaign?
Member, 2K replies to the thread with an excellent answer:
Cases do matter... The problem is that for IIS/Microsoft platform url's point the same place despite their casing. In Posix-world (UNIX,LINUX,BSD etc) url's are always case sensitive - ie. page.htm and Page.htm are physicly different files. IMO the latter is also they way RFFC-standards treat URL's.
Google and other SE's use mainly the latter. So if you have links to pageX with mixed casing (ie. pageX.htm, PageX.htm,pagex.htm etc) you are looking for troubles like
a) duplicate pages problem
b) pr flow/Internal linking structure problem (same page showing various PR with different casing)
I know this because we had a situation related to this about a year ago. Things might have changed in the way, but I'm not willing to test my luck
Domain names however can be a totally different story, because they are officially in small caps format, everything else is fiction/spelling mistakes made by users.
My understanding is that the domain name upper or lowercase will not matter. Most browsers automatically convert a domain name, subdomain name and tld to the lowercase version. In addition, you can't buy different cases of the same domain name. Having a link to a www versus non www version of a domain name, should affect your link building. So try to ask them all to point to the www version, or be consistent. Also, 301 redirect the non www to the www or visa versa. What about the file names? Well, its best to be careful with that and be consistent. I personally keep all my file names lowercase. As member Linux98 says, " Finally, your Path is case sensitive (domain.com/Path/To/File <> domain.com/path/to/file). Google would not lower case this element before inserting into its database because it will cause problems on a regular *nix server as pointed out above."
