Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
URL has caps, but canonical does not. Now what?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Backlinks that go to a redirected URL
Hey guys, just wondering, my client has 3 websites, 2 of 3 will be closed down and the domains will be permanently redirected to the 1 primary domain - however they have some high quality backlinks pointing the domains that will be redirected. How does this effective SEO? Domain One (primary - getting redesign and rebuilt) - not many backlinks
Technical SEO | | thinkLukeSEO
Domain Two (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks
Domain Three (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks When the new website is launched on Domain One I will contact the backlink providers and request they update their URL - i assume that would be the best.0 -
How do I deindex url parameters
Google indexed a bunch of our URL parameters. I'm worried about duplicate content. I used the URL parameter tool in webmaster to set it so future parameters don't get indexed. What can I do to remove the ones that have already been indexed? For example, Site.com/products and site.com/products?campaign=email have both been indexed as separate pages even though they are the same page. If I use a no index I'm worried about de indexing the product page. What can I do to just deindexed the URL parameter version? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | BT20090 -
Approved Word Separators in URLs
Hi There, We are in the process of revamping our URL structure and my devs tell me they have a technical problem using a hyphen as a word separator. There's a whole lot of competing recommendations out there and at this point I'm just confused. Does anyone have any idea what character would be next-best to the hyphen for separating words in a URL? Any reason to prefer one over another? Some links I've found discussing the topic: This page says that "__Google has confirmed that the point (.), the comma (,) and the hyphen (-) are valid word separators in URL’s.": http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/google-word-separator/ This page suggests the plus (+) symbol would be best: http://labs.phurix.net/posts/word-separators-in-urls This guy says he's tested and there's a whole bunch of symbols that will work as word separators: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/Symbols-as-word-separators-a-look-inside-the-search-engine-logic/ I'm leaning towards the tilde (~) or the plus (+) sign. Usage would be like so: http://www.domain.com/shop/sterling~silver OR /shop/sterling+silver etc... Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | Richline_Digital1 -
I need help with a PHP canonical URL tags
I found a little difficult for me to do a canonical tag in my PHP. On-Page Report Card We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. I don't know how to tidy my PHP Any suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lnietob0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050