What will the effect of normalising the case of my URLs be?

[SeeTickets]

Hi all,

I have a web site with a selection of pages with excellent rankings, mostly in the top 3 for the keywords we want to rank for.

Currently, the URLs are mostly presented mixed case, like this:

www.mydomain.com/Type/ITEM-IDENTIFIER/

However we have problems of different cases being used in different parts of our application, and also it's obviously not that attractive the way it is.

What we are proposing to do is deploy a change to our web site that lowercases all URLs in internal links, as well as present the URLs in lowercase in our sitemap.xml, and provide any links to partners from this point on in lowercase format.

We are also proposing to 301 redirect any non-lowercase URLs to the lowercase version.

These pages already have a canonical link tag due to us hosting different versions of these pages on multiple domains, for skinning purposes. The link in the canonical link tag will also be changed to be lowercase.

What I am concerned about is, URLs of the case above have been in the rankings for a few years now, and if all of a sudden our links are all lowercase, will they drop off the rankings? Or will the above measures mean that the pagerank is transferred to the lowercase version of the URL?

Thanks in advance,

James

[irvingw]

as long as you 301 everything you should be ok from a ranking perspective, you're passing the PR. The new 3021 page will assume the rank position of the old url.

Test the heck out of it before you push it live to make sure it's all working as expected though because you're doing a few things at once.

i think you're smart in doing this.