Will folder name listed in CAPS create canonical issue?
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Hi there,
I ran your site through Xenu and OSE and I couldn't see where the /SERVICES/ link might have come from either. From a gut feeling, as you suggest, the /SERVICES/ and /services/ content would be treated as duplicates as there's no rel=canonical and one doesn't 301 to the other.
It looks like Google is indexing a mix of /SERVICES/ and /services/ for your website, so I'd suggest just going with one (the lower case one preferably) and then 301ing the other to the main subfolder.
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You are kind enough to check my site completely with Xenu. Thank you for the support hemblem5.
In order to make it correct, I am going to add it rel=canonical with this in the page, http://www.macronimous.com/services/wordpress-development-india.asp
to get rid of capitalization of this URL with "SERVICES" , since, I see Moz too shows the following URL:
http://www.macronimous.com/SERVICES/wordpress-development-india.asp
Correct me if I am wrong. Thank you kindly.
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Hi there,
It's no problem at all!
If you want to get rid of the capitalisation, you would switch the order around, so on the /SERVICES/ pages, e.g. /SERVICES/wordpress-development-india.asp use the rel=canonical:
This tells Google that the preferred URL to index is the non-capitalised one. Here's some more details from Google on this:
Indicate the preferred URL with the
rel="canonical"link elementSuppose you want
http://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/to be the preferred URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content. You can indicate this to search engines as follows:-
Mark up the canonical page and any other variants with a rel="canonical" link element.
Add a element with the attributerel="canonical"to the section of these pages:This indicates the preferred URL to use to access the green dress post, so that the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)
So, to recap, if you want to get rid of the capitalised subfolders, on the /SERVICES/ pages use a rel="canonical" referring to the non-capitalised (/services/) versions. If it's the other way around and you want to **keep **the capitalised pages, then use a rel="canonical" with /SERVICES/ in on the non-capitalised pages.
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Thanks for the detailed response.But, I am bit confused. Let me explain again
I do NOT have a folder in capital letters such as /SERVICES/ nor, I do know from where Google captured and indexed as http://www.macronimous.com/SERVICES/wordpress-development-india.asp . This one URL us wrong.
1. We only have http://www.macronimous.com/services/wordpress-development-india.asp
2. So, on this page: http://www.macronimous.com/services/wordpress-development-india.asp
I like to add the following code:
So that we will get rid of /SERVICES/ - Correct?
Thank you.
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Hi there,
Even though you don't have that page, Google is still indexing it, because it returns a 200 status code - it doesn't 301 to the lowercase version. This means that even though you haven't created it, the website is still returning /SERVICES/ as individual web pages, separate from the lowercase ones. Even though the URL seems wrong to you, to Google, they're being told by the website 'hey, you should index these /SERVICES/ pages', due to the 200 status code.
Using the canonical you suggest would tell Google that the subfolder they should index is SERVICES. This would mean Google would drop (if it follows the canonical rule correctly) all lowercase iterations of /services/ and instead index /SERVICES/. So therefore, you do not want to add a canonical with /SERVICES/, as this would not get rid of /SERVICES/, it would tell Google that **this (/SERVICES/) is the version you want indexed. **
You should add a canonical tag to all of your /services/ pages indicating that the correct canonical version is /services/ - with the lowercase. This should then propagate to your /SERVICES/ pages, indicating the version you want Google to index is the lowercase version; this will get rid of /SERVICES/.
Alternatively, if this isn't clear for you, I would recommend you set up a 301 rule to redirect all versions of /SERVICES/ to /services/.
Hope this helps.
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So in short,
I should use
in the page http://www.macronimous.com/SERVICES/wordpress-development-india.asp
to get rid of "SERVICES" from Google Index. Got it!
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Yep, that's perfect! Let us know how you get on.