Upper and lower case spelling = dupe content?
-
Hi All,
I've looking at my Crawl Diagnostics Summary and working on getting my site errors down as low as possible.
One thing I'm noticing is that in the "Other URLs" column I'm seeing a lot of 1s. When I click on the number, it is showing me the exact URL with an upper case category title.
For example, it appears like it's telling me that these two URLs are considered duplicate content:
Is that right? Does google care about upper and lower case spelling?
-
Thanks guys! This a huge help. I'll get it taken care of.
-
URLs are case sensitive after the TLD, so these would appear to Google to be duplicate content. Theoretically, those could be two different pages. Ideally, you could 301 redirect all of one to the other. So if you're using lower case /category across your site, you would want to 301 all the /Category URLs to /category.
Some sites correct for capitalization in URLs, and some don't. Do you have internal links using both forms of "category"? If so, you should correct those to one form, as 301's don't pass all your link juice, so you'd create a bit of a leak.
-
Hi Shawn
URLs are case sensitive; so in the example in your question, yes you have duplicate pages there.
As Category is spelt with both an Upper case and a lower case C you will have two identical pages, which is not good for either Search or User Experience.
Some confirmation for you that it's an absolute must to stick with lower case URLs can be found under Point 10 of "11 Best Practices for URLs" which is a blog post here on SEOmoz from a long time ago by Rand Fishkin which is still extremely valid today.
So it's highly recommended that you 301 Redirect any URLs with Upper case letters in to the corresponding URL that's completely lower case.
Regards
Simon
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
-
Canonical tag on webstore products to avoid Duplicate Page Content ?
Hi, I would like to have an opinion on what how we are planning to solve the issue with Duplicate Page Contents that MOZ PRO is showing us. MOZ Pro is showing us a lot of pages with duplicate content as High Priority Issue. Mainly the problem is with products which have very few differences between them, e.g. pink bike model X and red bike model X. So we decided to implement a canonical tag on these products, and the pink bike model X will now have a canonical pointing to the red bike model X. So hopefully we will be ranking higher with our red bike model X and our pink bike model X will disapear from the index. Am I right ? Is it a good practice, since we will loose long tails indexes? I check each canonical in the Search Console, and we have extremely few searched for "pink bike model X" most of searches are "bike model X". Thank you in advance for your opinion. Isabelle
Moz Pro | | isabelledylag0 -
Why do I see a duplicate content errors when rel="canonical" tag is present
I was reviewing my first Moz crawler report and noticed the crawler returned a bunch of duplicate page content errors. The recommendations to correct this issue are to either put a 301 redirect on the duplicate URL or use the rel="canonical" tag so Google knows which URL I view as the most important and the one that should appear in the search results. However, after poking around the source code I noticed all of the pages that are returning duplicate content in the eyes of the Moz crawler already have the rel="canonical" tag. Does the Moz crawler simply not catch whether that tag is being used? If I have that tag in place, is there anything else I need to do in order to get that error to stop showing up in the Moz crawler report?
Moz Pro | | shinolamoz0 -
Duplicate Content
Crawl Diagnostics is returning duplicate content/title tags for every product image on listing pages of my classified site because each image is on a separate url. So this page, for example, http://marketplace.myclassicgarage.com/cars/all/Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/ has, among other things, the same title tag as all this page, http://marketplace.myclassicgarage.com/cars/all/Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/media/151968 which is one of many different images that are all child pages in the folder /media In this particular case there are over 140 pages with the same title tag because there are over 140 images for this particular car. That is just one listing and there are over 1,000 listings (vehicles) and that number will grow. Is this really a problem? With limited resources, what real positive effect will making all these images have unique title tags really have from a SERP perspective? Keep in mind this being user generated content, there is no way to descriptively update the title tags to something like <title>Bel Air Passenger Side Profile</title>. That is not feasible.
Moz Pro | | MyClassicGarage0 -
Can't find duplicate page content
Hi all. I'm trying to create a report to list all of my site's duplicate content that SEOmoz says we have. However when I click on the link it just shows me the title and description of the page. I don't know what the other page is that has duplicate content or what the duplicate content is. Where do I find this information? Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | Info12340 -
Finding the source of duplicate content URL's
We have a website that displays a number of products. The product has variations (sizes) and unfortunately every size has its own URL (for now anyway). Needless to say, this causes duplicate content issues. (And of course, we are looking to change the URL's for our site as soon as possible) However, even though these duplicate URL's exist, you should not be able to land on them by navigating through the site. In theory, the site should always display the link to the smallest size. It seems that there is a flaw in our system somewhere, as these links are now found in our campaign here on SEOmoz. My question: is there any way to find the crawl path that lead to the URL's that shouldn't have been found, so we can locate the problem?
Moz Pro | | DocdataCommerce0 -
How do I find the corresponding duplicate content pages from my SEOmoz report?
Once I have run my report and the duplicate content pages come up, is there a way to find out which pages have the duplicate content on them? I have one URL but where can I find the duplicate content that corresponds to it? Thanks Barry
Moz Pro | | MrBarrytg0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with WordPress
I'm having some difficulty with a few of the sites I'm managing right now. When I run a report here, I'm getting a duplicate content issue with sites that I'm running through WordPress. Sites running on a different CMS are not getting the issue. The duplicate content is being listed as from two URL's that are identical. I checked trailing slash, spelling, capitalization, everything. It looks like the same site is being marked as two with duplicate content. Does anyone have any ideas of what could be causing this and/or what I may be able to do to resolve the issue (or if it's really something to worry about or not)? Thanks. (and thanks for helping the new guy!)
Moz Pro | | DeliaAssociates0 -
Solving duplicate content errors for what is effectively the same page.
Hello,
Moz Pro | | jcarter
I am trying out your SEOMOZ and I quite like it. I've managed to remove most of the errors on my site however I'm not sure how to get round this last one. If you look at my errors you will see most of them revolve around things like this: http://www.containerpadlocks.co.uk/categories/32/dead-locks
http://www.containerpadlocks.co.uk/categories/32/dead-locks?PageSize=9999 These are essentially the same pages because the category for Dead Locks does not contain enough products to view over more than one resulting in the fact that when I say 'View all products' on my webpage, the results are the same. This functionality works with categories with more than the 20 per page limit. My question is, should I be either: Removing the link to 'show all products' (which adds the PageSize query string value) if no more products will be shown. Or putting a no-index meta tag on the page? Or some other action entirely? Looking forward to your reply and you showing how effective Pro is. Many Thanks,
James Carter0