Capitals in url creates duplicate content?

[CarlS]

Hey Guys,

I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this.

Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it.

However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls.

for example.

"www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals).

Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

LM.

[semshah143]

Hi LucasM,

Yes its possible by server side that you cant open a url with capital letters if you are using small letters.

But I dont think google will talke capitalisation in consideration.

Is it showing you in Google webmaster tool in duplicate titles and duplicate descriptions ?

If its showing then ask your coder to play with .htaccess to stop opening a url with different small - capital letter combination.

Thanks,

[IanTheScot]

Google does count this as duplicate content. Semil is right. You want to have someone do url rewrites on the server side to 301 these to lowercase.

[AlanMosley]

Yes its seen as too different urls

http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats

If you are uisng a windows server (IIS), you can fix this easy by using the IIS url-rewrite addon. it had a rewite as lowercase preset

[CarlS]

Thanks Alan - I'll get on this...

[CarlS]

Thanks Semil - The same duplicates are not showing in Google Webmaster Tools, for instance SEOMoz is showing 639 duplicate page content and 646 duplicate page titles. Webmaster tools is 88 and 37 respectively.

Looking into the numbers in SEOmoz again (and they've risen since the original post) there's a huge number which fall under the capitalisation discussed but also some which seem to register as HTTPS and HTTP.

[nans]

If Google ignores the mixed usage of capitals in URL's, then why is the SEOMoz reporting it? If it is irrelevant, why not leaving it out?? It takes quite some work to filter out the irrelevant stuff!

[AlanMosley]

I don't know that Google does ignore it. anyhow Bing does not http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats

[nans]

Thanks for your reply Alan!

Bing is irrelevant in Belgium Maybe marketshare of 0,00005 or so

When I look at the SEOMoz crawling reports I panic, but when I look at GWT, I'm happy... The difference is huge.

So, no sure I will keep on using these reports..

[AlanMosley]

From my memory Google does treat urls as case sensitive.

Best to keep al urls as lower case.

[dimitreliasb]

The IIS url-rewrite addon works great!