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.
-
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
-
Having Problems to Index all URLs on Sitemap
Hi all again ! Thanks in advance ! My client's site is having problems to index all its pages. I even bought the full extension of XML Sitemaps and the number of urls increased, but we still have problems to index all of them. What are the reasons? The robots.txt is open for all robots, we only prohibit users and spiders to enter our Intranet. I've read that duplicate content and 404's can be the reason. Anything else?
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Need URL structure suggestions
On my website I am in the process of creating expat city guides for different cities in Cambodia. I've already gotten three up, but I am worried that my URL structure is not the best, so I am wondering if I should fix it before I put the rest up. Right now the city guides are housed here: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/ There's a section for each city, this one is for Battambang: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang And then there are sections for hotels, restaurants, etc. movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation So once you finally get to a review for an individual hotel or activity, the URL is really long, like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation/classy-hotel Should I just par the section names down so the URL would be something like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ ? I was hoping by having the long URLs slugs for my section pages, such as "battambang-hotels-and-accommodation" they would be more likely to show on search terms like "Battambang hotels" than if the section was just "accommodation." However, this whole section is getting much less search traffic than anything else on my site, so I am wondering if it is because of these ridiculously long URLs. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Lina5000 -
URL Understanding -
Hello everyone! Can anyone help me understanding this url? Product.asp?PID=1236 cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Case sensitive url's
Hi, Really appreciate advice on this one in advance! We had a problem with case sensitive urls (eg: /web-jobs or /Web-jobs) We added a code to convert all urls into lowercase letters and added 301 redirection. We are now experiencing problems with duplicate page content. Each time a url contains caps letter it is converted and redirected to small letter url. I can convert all urls into lowercase letters (all places) but the problem now is google have already indexed urls so they may cause duplicate content issue. The solution: Remove 301 redirection added to convert url into small letter. Add canonical url which converts url into complete small letter, so google index content only from canonical url. But I am little confused about what will happen to already indexed pages with caps in url. Appreciate any advice you can give? Simon
Technical SEO | | simmo2350 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Query strings in Canoncials URLs
Video on my site all resides at www.mydomain.com/video in a player that does not assign unique URLs for each video. We may be able to rewrite the URLs to include a unique identifier found in the video's metadata (www.mydomain.com/video/?bctid=17769780). If I did this, how would it impact the canonical URL? Do the SEs accept canonicals with query strings? What if I only changed the canonical URL and did not change the video's URL? Would that be a problem?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Slashes In Url's
If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gregster10000 -
URL's for news content
We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below: http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
Technical SEO | | mccormackmorrison
http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-title Since this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go? Thanks P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event? Thanks again! Neil0