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Capital Letters in URLS?

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  • hehhreh
    hehhreh last edited by Oct 4, 2012, 11:07 PM

    Remove

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • SanketPatel
      SanketPatel last edited by Oct 5, 2012, 12:25 AM Oct 5, 2012, 12:25 AM

      Having Capital letters in the URLs are not bad for SEO, Google consider this case as negative seo and it will not affect your ranking, but i recommend to use lower case in URL because it is User-friendly and SE friendly,  and may be possible that you will have duplicate content issue if search engine see variations of upper and lower case among URLs that all evidently point to the same content. Read matt cutts's advices on URL http://www.seosean.com/blog/matt-cutts-advice-on-urls-page-names

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • NakulGoyal
        NakulGoyal last edited by Oct 5, 2012, 12:01 AM Oct 5, 2012, 12:01 AM

        I agree with Neil. It's not bad, just a good user practice to keep them lowercase so that's there's no confusion. The best bet for you would to be to use a consistent format and mimic that in your canonical URLs so only that variation gets crawled and indexed.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • riplash
          riplash last edited by Oct 5, 2012, 12:28 AM Oct 4, 2012, 11:58 PM

          Whilst it's not necessarily "bad" per se, the implications are, so this kind of canonicalisation issue needs to be taken care of using URL rewrites/permanent 301 redirects.

          Typically, on a Windows-based server (without any URL rewriting), a 200 (OK) status code will be returned for each version regardless of the combination of upper/lower-case letters used - giving search engines duplicate content to index, and others duplicate content to link to. This naturally dilutes rankings and link equity across the two (or more) identical pages.

          There is an excellent section on solving canonicalisation issues on Windows IIS servers in this SEOmoz article by Dave Sottimano.

          On a Linux server (without any URL rewriting) you will usually get a 200 for the lower-case version, and a 404 (Not Found) for versions with upper-case characters. Whilst search engines wont index the 404, you are potentially wasting link equity passed to non-existent pages, and it can be really confusing for users, too.

          There is a lot of info around the web about solving Linux canonicalisation issues (here is an article from YouMoz). If your site uses a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress, most of these issues are solved using the default .htaccess file, and completely eliminated when you combine this with a well chosen extension or two.

          You can help the search engines figure out which version of a page you regard as the original by using the rel="canonical" meta tag in the html . This passes link equity and rankings from duplicate versions to the main, absolute version.

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