URL Mixed Cases and Duplicate Content
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Hi There,
I have a question for you. I am working on a website where by typing any letter of the URL in lower or upper case, it will give a 200 code.
Examples
www.examples.com/page1/product
www.examples.com/paGe1/Product
www.examples.com/PagE1/prOdUcT
www.examples.com/pAge1/proODUCt
and so on…
Although I cannot find evidence of backlinks pointing to my page with mixed cases, shall I redirect or rel=canonical all the possible combination of the cases to a lower version of them in order to prevent duplicate content? And if so, do you have any advice on how to complete such a massive job?
Thanks a lot
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Thank you guys! Very helpful answers. Take care
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Hi,
Technically this is duplicate content, but it is most likely something search engines understand to ignore (especially if no links point to the upper case / incorrect URLs). If it particularly bothers you, place a self-referencing canonical tag in the page's file so that www.examples.com/pAGe/PROducT references www.examples.com/page/product in its tag. Either that or a 301.
Cheers.
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Have a look around many other sites, and they all do the same. Do a search for something in Google and then change the case of anything after the domain. Microsoft is the same. I am sure that there are examples that will 404 these requests, and that will then be a server side setting.
I really wouldn't worry about that though. MOZ is the same as well. Upper or lower case will give you the same page. in the last 15 years of SEO, I have never come across this as an issue
-Andy
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It makes more sense to make a server level rule that will 301 any mixed case to a lower so if a URL is being accessed on anything other than lowercase it will redirect to the lower case URL.
This should save you some effort in the long run.
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