Changing URLs from sentence case to lower case

[tigersohelll]

Hi Guys,

We are contemplating of changing our site URL structure from sentence case to all lowercase.

www.example.com/All-Products/Bedroom-Furniture/

www.example.com/all-products/bedroom-furniture/

We will use 301 redirect for old to new.

Its a 3 year old ecommerce site and currently rank very decent on serps.

The agency that does our seo is recommending this change and reckons that all lowecase URLs as preferred over our current URL structure.

My worry is we will lose our current ranking but agency advises that rankings will probably go lower or fluctuate for some time and get back to its original position or may even rank better in due course as we are doing a 301 redirect and once the site is crawled Google will know the change.

We are approaching Christmas and thenext 2 months are most busiest period of the year, we don't want to risk on traffic.

I would really appreciate if the community experts can advise,

Is it really that lowercase URLs  are better than our current url structure?

By doing 301 will our rankings come back to same in "due course" ?

How much of a risk is it to do these changes at this time of the year?

Thanking you in advance,

Sohail

[ClaytonJ]

Sohail

I am not happy.  Good question to ask.  If it works - do not touch it.  The first principal in SEO is do no harm.

I would consider terminating them... poor advice leading into the most important time for sales for you for the year. They sound like a web developer not an seo consultant.

Sorry I am a bit grumpy... but do not like it.  Your intuition is spot on.

[aarongray]

By doing the 301 your agency is right you won't lose ranking but whenever you make a change, google needs time to take those changes in. They are right you will go down and back up. I don't see how you will go higher by changing the URL.

If the next few months are big times of the year for you than your better off waiting until after xmas to make the change. You have gone three years like this with no issue so really another few months won't hurt. It's not worth the risk because things can always go wrong and even more so when it comes to 301 URLs if something goes wrong it can really hurt.

Also when doing the change ask your SEO firm how they will be doing it. I find setting a RewriteRule in htaccess to change all uppercase URLs to lowercase URLs make it easier and safer than insure 301 is setup for each URL.

[DirkC]

For Google there is no preference for upper or lower case - so the proposed change will bring you no benefit. Even if the migration risk is very small, if you are close to your most important sales period - don't do it.

Dirk

[tigersohelll]

Hello Guys,

Thank you for your reply and excellent advises. We have made a decision to drop the transformation all together and will continue with our existing URL structure.

Thank you all again.

Cheers !

[cbielich]

Just in case later in the future you want to turn all your URLs to lower case you can do something like this

In your .htaccess file insert this

ensure it is not a file on the drive first

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule (.*) rewrite-strtolower.php?rewrite-strtolower-url=$1 [QSA,L]

Then in your root directory place a file called rewrite-strtolower.php and insert

if(isset($_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url'])) {
$url = $_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url'];
unset($_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url']);
$params = http_build_query($_GET);
if(strlen($params)) {
$params = '?' . $params;
}
header('Location: http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/' . strtolower($url) . $params, true, 301);
}
exit();
?>