Capitalization matters? Are Keywords treated as Case Sensitive?

[lwadmin]

I have searched the forum for this questions and basically found the following answer: “Neither Google nor SEOmoz treat keywords as case sensitive. For example, “Jobfair” and “jobfair” should return the same results.”

http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-capitalization-matter

http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-keywords-case-sensitive

http://www.seomoz.org/q/capitalisation-of-campaign-keywords-why-does-this-affect-traffic-but-not-rankings

How then can it be that I get the following results in the Rankings Report? (see example pic)

And more importantly, which one is correct?

sCx74sd.jpg

[MikeRoberts]

In some cases, the capitalized version and lower case version of a search won't return the EXACT same results in the SERPs (sometimes a result will shuffle a bit [though not by much from what I've seen]) but Google does understand that "Example" and "example" are the same word much in the same way that it knows a singular and plural of the same word are related, i.e. "Shoes" will show up for a search of "Shoe" and vice versa.

If you also take into account the regular shuffling of the SERPs every time Google so much as blinks, there is the possibility that when the rankings data was pulled for your terms they were done so in a fashion that shows two different numbers that were both correct at the times they were pulled. Plus, in the past week (week and a half?) there was a decent bit of volatility in the SERPs that lead people to believe there was an algorithm change happening so for all you know that may have put an odd hiccup in the numbers as well.

Worse comes to worst you could always do a bit of testing to see if maybe you stumbled on a previously unknown traffic/rankings difference. Shouldn't be but with 500+ algorithm changes a year, you never know.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey There,

Thanks for writing in with a great question! Capitalization definitely shouldn't matter to our crawler or to Google, so I looked into this keyword with one of our devs and it looks like the rankings for "jobmesse" was collected about 16 hours before the rankings for "Jobmesse" so we believe this is actually a natural fluctuation in the SERP for this keyword. I manually check the current rankings for both version of the keyword, I am seeing that your site currently ranks at #11 and the keyword has a difficulty score of 56%, so it is definitely within reason to see fluctuate in a matter of hours between the rankings.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn

[lwadmin]

Thank you very much, both of you, for the very helpful answers!