Capitals in URLs

[McTaggart]

Hello Mozzers. I've just been looking at a site with capitals in the URL - capitals are used in the product descriptions, so you'll have a URL structure like this: www.company.com/directory1/Double-Beds-Luxury  (such URLs do not work if I lower the case of the capitals).

There are 50,000 such products on the site. Clearly one drawback is potential customers might type in, or link to, the lower case of the URL and get a "not found" result (though the urls are relatively long so not that likely I'm thinking). Are there any additional drawbacks with the use of capitals outlined here?

[anthonydnelson]

It's nice to have all URLs be consistent (all lowercase for example) but there is nothing wrong with having capitals in your URL. As you mentioned, the chance that someone types in a long product URL instead of copy/paste is very low and even if they do, they'd probably check their link to your site. I would leave it as is and not worry about it.

Amazon uses capital letters in many of their product URLs. The only difference is their non-cap versions work as well.

[AngelDigital]

I agree with Anthony, it's not a problem - the user would just copy and paste the URL in.

I think this can cause an issue on Windows servers since they would return the same page for Double-Beds-Luxury and double-beds-luxury (like Amazon does). Since Google interprets characters literally, accidentally linking to the wrong page can make it appear like you have dupe content - Google usually figures this out but it's thought it can dilute your link juice to that page. But you've mentioned that the page 404s if you lower the case which is good, I guess the site's on a linux server. I don't think here's nothing to worry about at all with leaving the caps as they are.