Upper and lower case spelling = dupe content?

[shawn81]

Hi All,

I've looking at my Crawl Diagnostics Summary and working on getting my site errors down as low as possible.

One thing I'm noticing is that in the "Other URLs" column I'm seeing a lot of 1s. When I click on the number, it is showing me the exact URL with an upper case category title.

For example, it appears like it's telling me that these two URLs are considered duplicate content:

http://mysite.com/Category

http://mysite.com/category

Is that right? Does google care about upper and lower case spelling?

[SimonCullum]

Hi Shawn

URLs are case sensitive;  so in the example in your question, yes you have duplicate pages there.

As Category is spelt with both an Upper case and a lower case C you will have two identical pages, which is not good for either Search or User Experience.

Some confirmation for you that it's an absolute must to stick with lower case URLs can be found under Point 10 of "11 Best Practices for URLs" which is a blog post here on SEOmoz from a long time ago by Rand Fishkin which is still extremely valid today.

So it's highly recommended that you 301 Redirect any URLs with Upper case letters in to the corresponding URL that's completely lower case.

Regards

Simon

[john4math]

URLs are case sensitive after the TLD, so these would appear to Google to be duplicate content.  Theoretically, those could be two different pages.  Ideally, you could 301 redirect all of one to the other.  So if you're using lower case /category across your site, you would want to 301 all the /Category URLs to /category.

Some sites correct for capitalization in URLs, and some don't.  Do you have internal links using both forms of "category"?  If so, you should correct those to one form, as 301's don't pass all your link juice, so you'd create a bit of a leak.

[shawn81]

Thanks guys! This a huge help. I'll get it taken care of.