URL has caps, but canonical does not. Now what?

[94501]

Hi,

Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?

[Malika1]

you will have to redirect one URL to another in order to have them resolved the way you want.

If you have canonical tags implemented, then it wont redirect and resolve. The purpose of canonical tag is to let search engines know about your preferred URL. It doesnt redirect search engines or users to your preferred page.

Hope this makes sense.

• Malika

[94501]

That might be an YUGE number of urls. Do you think forwarding all those is really worth doing, since the the canonical is always the lower case version?

[Malika1]

In my opinion, you dont have to redirect if you have set the canonicals. Couple of things to keep in check (more best practice) with this approach -

1. All the internal links are lower case - just makes the website look cleaner by saving a lot of search engine bots time identifying the canonical urls. Less processing for search engine bots this way. Also, it will help with analytics tracking. If the internal links are uppercase then users will end up browsing upper case URLs. If lower case URLs are indexed and getting traffic but after reaching your website users start viewing upper case URLs too then it can cause your analytics data to be scattered between these two.

2. Monitor your organic results to see what URLs are indexed in SERPs. If the canonical tags are implemented well and search engines have crawled your website, your preferred URLs should show in organic SERPs.

[LoganRay]

I've had some run-ins with case-sensitive URLs in the past and it drives me crazy, I don't understand why CMSs still do that!! While canonical tags are a perfectly fine way to handle this, there's a better solution. Brian Love wrote a great blog post on how to do server-side URL lower-casing. I've used this on a few sites and it works great.