Google Treating these URL's as diff, but they are same. please help

[AnkammaRao]

Google is treating, below URL's as two different URL's when they are same.  How to solve this. Please help. Case 1:/2570/Venture-Capital-and-Capital-Markets/2570/venture-capital-and-capital-marketsCase 2: /xxx/Java-Programming//xxx/Java-ProgrammingPlease help, how to solve this. Thanks in advance

[Sheena_Schleicher]

What you're dealing with is duplicate content caused by URL inconsistencies. My first move would be to implement rel="canonical" tags to tell search bots which is the preferred URL (lower-case, then either with or without the trailing-slash). You can read more about it here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

I always use the Moz bar on the actual Moz site to see how things should be implemented - that's allowed, right? & I noticed that they have added rel=canonical site-wide (to prevent any unforeseen dup content issues). You can see an example of how it's used by viewing the source code here: moz.com/rand/category/archives/events/ and http://moz.com/rand/category/events/

Before you take any action, though, **you need to determine the preferred structure for all URLs on the site. **

[digitalcrc]

Sounds like you're on .NET (or something case-sensitive). The best way to deal with this in my opinion is at the server level, by only allowing lowercase URLs. This is how you would implement this in .NET:

  <match url="[A-Z]" ignorecase="false"></match>

<action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" appendquerystring="true"></action>

Canonical tags are technically an option, but you will have to manually add them each and every time this issue occurs (and stay on top of it as an ongoing action item). It's almost always preferable to have each page accessible from a single URL if at all possible. Automatically adding self-referencing canonicals would probably just exacerbate the problem since they uppercase pages would still be pointing to the uppercase pages, lowercase to lowercase, etc.

I would strongly suggest defaulting to lowercase over uppercase URLs to stay consistent with other sites on the internet (also, most linking sites will assume lowercase when linking to your site).

The good news is this a fairly common, fixable problem

If your site is in fact using .NET, this article is a good starting point (#2 is where I got the above code snippet from).