Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?

[jkenyon]

Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page:

http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx

http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx

The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Janice,

The proper solution would be to have the site set up at the server level to automatically rewrite URLs so they have one consistent pattern (typically all lower case).  And to make sure all links within the site pointing to other pages on the site use that preferred capitalization method.  While having Canonical tags can help alleviate the problem, they're not a best practices "only" solution.  So speak with the site administrator or programmer to get the rewrite functionality implemented.

[jkenyon]

I understand your answer and about setting up rewrites, but what I really want to know is why there are two pages listed (one uppercase, one lowercase) when there is only one physical page on the site. All links within the site point to the page using the uppercase name.

I don't want to have to add a rewrite for the lowercase name every time I add a page to the site - this doesn't seem right which is why I'm wondering if there is something else wrong.

[AlanBleiweiss]

If the server allows upper case and lower case then from a technical perspective they could both be different files.  Like having www.domain.com and domain.com point to the same home page - they may be the same, but technically they could be two different places.

The solution should be set up to not require having to do a rewrite every time a new page is created.  It should be automatic.

[jkenyon]

Well, it is a Windows server and my understanding is that it is case-insensitive, but I'll verify this with our hosting provider. Nevertheless, would it be preferable to set up the rewrite from the mixed case names to all lowercase names or vice versa? Or perhaps it doesn't matter.

Thanks for your help with this - lots to learn and work through with these tools.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Glad to be of help Janice.

From a readability perspective, in which case I'd suggest to have all lower case.

[ChatterBlock]

I think this is one of the most overlooked duplicate content issues.  Not sure why it's not talked about as much as it is.  I quite often have been using upper and lowercase intermittently.  E.g., mysite.com/Las-Vegas/ and mysite.com/las-vegas/, not knowing it made any difference.

I guess a .htaccess rewrite to all lowercase is in order.  Thanks SEOMoz.  You guys rock.

[KeriMorgret]

Dr. Pete doesn't cover case (though it's mentioned in the comments), but just about everything else you might want to know about duplicate content is talked about at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world, including ways to remedy it. It sounds like you've got a plan here, but I'm also adding it for the benefit of others looking at this thread.