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.
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
-
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)?
Any other tips?
EX:
http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html
OR
-
Are you serving the same page for both /MBA and /mba? You should set up a 301 redirect from one to the other.
In Analytics, you can set a custom filter to make your URLs case insensitive, but I don't believe that'll fix the data currently in your account, it'll only fix them going forward. That process is outlined here: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=90397.
My URLs are all lowercased so I can't actually find an example in my account to test, but when I do an advenced filter and select Include Page with the match type of "Matching RegExp" and try URLs with uppercase characters, Analytics appears to be making the query case insensitive. So you can try that as well.
If the prior paragraph didn't work for you, you can do this on a URL by URL basis, by doing an advanced search by regular expression and substituting in "[M|m][B|b][A|a]" for "mba".
-
John and Team,
Suppose I have a site with 8000 pages and a small percentage of them in google analytics are showing up twice because the pages are linked through upper and lowercase links. So in Google analytics (GA) there would be two rows:
http:///www.blah.com/MBA
Is there a type of query I can run in GA to allow me to find all pages where the url is the same except for the upper and lower casing? I want to go into GA at Standard Reporting -> Content -> all pages and do an advanced search.
- topic:timeago_earlier,10 months
-
Is the Short Title a redirect or the actual URL? If it's a redirect then it shouldn't be a problem. You can also use canonical if you want to use the lowercase and host the other page. But that's is a sloppy solution.
-
I agree with this completely. Lowercase with hyphens is my preference. Some E-commerce companies (let's use Volusion as an example), give you the choice to use hyphens or underscores in a product's URL. This is nice and they even offer you the ability to write what the URL will be under the "Short TItle" option. However, this "Short Title" option is what will show in your URL AND the link text for a "Related Product" listing on the site. So if I want the link text to look normal when someone sees a Related Product link, I have to capitalize the text I put for the "Short Title" which will then cause the URL to be in Caps as well. This is a pretty significant flaw in their system and I have alerted them to the problem numerous times. Hopefully they will get it fixed soon.
-
I agree. Lowercase in the example above. For ease of direct typing.
But when advertising just a website URL in print offline, caps. www.BulwarkPestControl.com is easier to read than www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com.
-
The fact a Caps create a 404 error on LAMP site is a pet peeve of mine - so is the fact Google thinks mix cases on IIS are separate (thus duplicate) URLs.
Too arbitrary to be picky about and cause user frustration.
Thanks goodness at lease DoMaInS can be what ever.
-
I like lowercase because when I type URLs by hand, I don't think to capitalize things. If you capitalize things, you have to get the casing right to make the URL valid (unless you're setting up all sorts of fancy redirects), otherwise you a 404 and are left scratching your head. Also, I agree with Dan that it looks better.
Hyphens vs. underscores is a classic question; Matt Cutts says to go with hyphens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k. I like that better too.
-
Justin
I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better. And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.
-Dan
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
-
Bulk URL Removal in Webmaster Tools
One of Wordpress sites was hacked (for about 10 hours), and Google picked up 4000+ urls in the index. The site is fixed, but I'm stuck with all those urls in the index. All the urls of of the form: walkerorthodontics.com/index.php?online-payday-cash-loan.htmloncewe The only bulk removal option I could find was to remove an entire folder, but I can't do that, as it would only leave the homepage and kill off everything else. For some crazy reason, the removal tools doesn't support wildcards, so that obvious solution is right out. So, how do it get rid of 4000 results? And no, waiting around for them to 404 out of the index isn't an option.
Technical SEO | Jun 9, 2016, 6:29 PM | MichaelGregory0 -
Include or exclude noindex urls in sitemap?
We just added tags to our pages with thin content. Should we include or exclude those urls from our sitemap.xml file? I've read conflicting recommendations.
Technical SEO | Oct 20, 2016, 4:30 AM | vcj0 -
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server. We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to. Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting. When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s. We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain. We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input. Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise. Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days. Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories. Thank you. Rosemary One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | Feb 26, 2016, 10:02 PM | RosemaryB3 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | Nov 30, 2015, 10:01 PM | whiteonlySEO0 -
Flat vs Hierarchical URL Structure
Hi, We are redoing our site structure and I was wondering what are the benefits of having a flat url structure. For example store.com/product instead of doing store.com/category/product. I noticed sites doing it both ways, even moz.com has both structures ex: moz.com/learn/seo and when you clck on something it brings you to moz.com/seo-expert-quiz (even though following the previous logic it should be moz.com/learn/seo/seo-expert-quiz) Please advise, Thanks!
Technical SEO | Sep 9, 2014, 1:53 PM | WSteven0 -
Mobile URL parameter (Redirection to desktop)
Hello, We have a parallel mobile website and recently we implemented a link pointing to the desktop website. This redirect is happening via a javascript code and results in a url followed by this paramenter: ?m=off Example:
Technical SEO | Apr 29, 2013, 10:36 AM | echo1
http://www.m.website.com redirects to:
http://www.website.com/?m=off Questions: Will the "http://www.website.com/?m=off" be considered duplicate content with "http://www.website.com" since they both return the same content? Is there any possibility that Google will take into consideration the url ending in "/?m=off"? How should we treat this new url? The webmaster tools URL parameter configuration at the moment isn't experiencing problems but should we submit the parameter anyway in order not to be indexed or should we wait first and see the error response? In case we should submit this for removal... what's the best way to do it? Like this? Parameter: ?m=off Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - doesn't affect page content Any help is much appreciated.
Thank you!0 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | Oct 13, 2012, 2:03 AM | briankb0 -
What is the best URL designed for a product page?
Should a product page URL include the category name and subcategory name in it? Most ecommerce platforms it seems are designed to do have the category and sub-category names included in the URL followed by the product name. If that is the case and the same product is listed in more then 1 category and sub-category then will that product have 2 unique urls and as a result be treated as 2 different product pages by google? And then since it is the same product in two places on the site won't google treat those 2 pages as having duplicate content? SO is it best to not have the category and sub-category names in the URL of a product page? And lastly, is there a preferred character limit for a URL to be less than in size? Thanks!
Technical SEO | Jul 21, 2012, 10:05 PM | gallreddy0
