Dup titles based on capitaization
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I am getting a lot of duplicate title errors when the only difference reported in SEOMoz's detail download shows that the capitalization in URL's from 2 referrer's is slightly different. But there's really only one page. See the example list of dups below:
Title:
<colgroup><col width="511"></colgroup>
|College Classroom Maps
|
URL:
<colgroup><col width="566"></colgroup>
| http://www.wall-maps.com/Classroom/College-maps.htm |Dup'S URL from another page:
<colgroup><col width="566"></colgroup>
| http://www.wall-maps.com/Classroom/College-Maps.htm |So you see the M in maps is capitalized in the A tag on the second referring page. I would be pretty shocked to learn that Google would consider this a duplicate title, but I am always learning new things. I do have canonical set up on my home page because this site can be accessed by www.wall-maps.com and wall-maps.com. So I don't think it's a lack of a canonical. Could this be a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it because IIS is not case sensitive and maybe Apache is??
Thanks in advance to whom ever can shed some light on this.
Ted
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I agree with Oleg, you should add canonicals to the pages, because URLs can get messed up all the time due to things like capitalization, query parameters, etc.
Also, the fact that OSE is detecting two versions of your page probably means that both versions of the URL are being linked to from somewhere. It would be a good idea to figure out where the variant links are coming from (especially if it's your own site) and be consistent about your capitalization on all your links.
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Could this be a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it because IIS is not case sensitive and maybe Apache is??
This is most likely the case. Most websites would treat those URLs as separate pages and think crawlers would too. You should set up canonicals so that only 1 version of the URL is indexed (whichever way you link to the page most often)
In addition, you should choose whether you want a www. or non-www url and 301 to your preferred version (I would keep the www as it looks like you have more links to it).
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