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
-
Is one page with long content better than multiple pages with shorter content?
(Note, the site links are from a sandbox site and has very low DA or PA) If you look at this page, you will see at the bottom a lengthy article detailing all of the properties of the product categories in the links above. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-s/432.htm My question is, is there more SEO value in having the one long article in the general product category page, or in breaking up the content and moving the sub-topics as content to the more specific sub-category pages? e.g. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Button-Head-Socket-s/1579.htm
Moz Pro | | AspenFasteners
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Cap-Screws-s/331.htm
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Captive-Panel-Scre-s/1559.htm0 -
Solving 'duplicate content' for page 2 of X for 1 blog post
Hi to all SEO wizards, For my Dutch blog google-plus-marketing.nl I'm using WordPress Genesis framework 2.0 with news theme pro 2.0 responsive theme. I love the out of the box SEO friendliness and features. One of those features is that it allows for a blog post or page to be divided into several pages. This results in MOZ signaling duplicate titles for all pages after the 1st page. Now I was thinking that a canonical url set to the first page should do the trick for me as I reason that the rank will go the the first page and the rest will not be seen as duplicates. Genesis does some good stuff on it's own and places the following meta tags in the header for the first page. All looks well and my question is about the same meta tags for the 2nd page and higher that I pasted below this one for the 1st page. Meta tags page 1 of X for blog post Meta tags page 2 of X for the same blog post Would it not be better to point the canonical url for page 2 till X to always point to the first page? In this case:
Moz Pro | | DanielMulderNL0 -
Duplicate Page Titles & Content
We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome) 😕 We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly. My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?
Moz Pro | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Crawl report - duplicate page title/content issue
When the crawl report is finished, it is saying that there are duplicate content/page titles issues. However there is a canonical tag that is formatted correctly so just wondered if this was a bug or if anyone else was having the same issues? For example, I'm getting a error warning for this page http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/categories/categories_travel?sort=name_asc&searchterm=&page=1&layout=table
Moz Pro | | KarlBantleman0 -
Duplicate content error?
I am getting a duplicate content error for the following pages: http://www.bluelinkerp.com/products/accounting/index.asp http://www.bluelinkerp.com/products/accounting/ But, of course, the 2nd link is just an automatic redirect to the index file, is it not? Why is it thinking it is a different URL? See image. NJfxA.png
Moz Pro | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Excel tips or tricks for duplicate content madness?
Dearest SEO Friends, I'm working on a site that has over 2,400 instances of duplicate content (yikes!). I'm hoping somebody could offer some excel tips or tricks to managing my SEOMoz crawl diagnostics summary data file in a meaningful way, because right now this spreadsheet is not really helpful. Here's a hypothetical situation to describe why: Say we had three columns of duplicate content. The data is displayed thusly: | Column A | Column B | Column C URL A | URL B | URL C | In a perfect world, this is easy to understand. I want URL A to be the canonical. But unfortunately, the way my spreadsheet is populated, this ends up happening: | Column A | Column B | Column C URL A | URL B | URL C URL B | URL A | URL C URL C | URL A | URL B | Essentially all of these URLs would end up being called a canonical, thus rendering the effect of the tag ineffective. On a site with small errors, this has never been a problem, because I can just spot check my steps. But the site I'm working on has thousands of instances, making it really hard to identify or even scale these patterns accurately. This is particularly problematic as some of these URLs are identified as duplicates 50+ times! So my spreadsheet has well over 100K cells!!! Madness!!! Obviously, I can't go through manually. It would take me years to ensure the accuracy, and I'm assuming that's not really a scalable goal. Here's what I would love, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Does anyone know of a formulaic way that Excel could identify row matches and think - "oh! these are all the same rows of data, just mismatched. I'll kill off duplicate rows, so only one truly unique row of data exists for this particular set" ? Or some other work around that could help me with my duplicate content madness? Much appreciated, you Excel Gurus you!
Moz Pro | | FMLLC0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Content crawl errors for Magento Login Page
I am using the Magento shopping cart, and 99% of my duplicate content errors come from the login page. The URL looks like: http://www.site.com/customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tbW1zcGVjaW9zYS5jb20vcmV2aWV3L3Byb2R1Y3QvbGlzdC9pZC8xOTYvY2F0ZWdvcnkvNC8jcmV2aWV3LWZvcm0%2C/ Or, the same url but with the long string different from the one above. This link is available at the top of every page in my site, but I have made sure to add "rel=nofollow" as an attribute to the link in every case (it is done easily by modifying the header links template). Is there something else I should be doing? Do I need to try to add canonical to the login page? If so, does anyone know how to do it using XML?
Moz Pro | | kdl01 -
Reducing duplicate content
Callcatalog.com is a complaint directory for phone numbers. People post information on the phone calls they get. Since there are many many phone numbers, obviously people haven't posted information on ALL of the phone numbers, THUS I have many phone numbers with zero content. SEOMoz is telling me that pages with zero content looks like duplicate content with each other.. The only difference between two pages that have zero coments is the title and phone number embedded in the page. For example, http://www.callcatalog.com/phones/view/413-563-3263 is a page that has zero comments.. I don't want to remove these zero comment phone number pages from the directory since many people find the pages via a phone number search. Here's my question: what can I do to make google / seomoz think that thexe zero comment pages is not dupliicate content?
Moz Pro | | seo_ploom0
