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.
Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing
-
This search - site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
gives me this result from Google:
Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'. When I click to see it I get:
Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended.
I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice. Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls? And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.
-
Hi AMHC,
It makes sense that without hardly any backlinks built up Google wont find my upper case URLS since all the page links have been changed, however, I am writing out all of the urls that are redirected into email, and from that I can tell that Google is finding them--I guess they may have a list of urls from prior indexing that they crawl independent of what their crawler comes up with.
I'll keep looking to see what they have indexed and if it turns out they just aren't crawling certain pages, will put them in a sitemap to be crawled..It's a good idea for taking care of the problem quickly--so if it progresses too slowly I'll do that.
Thanks very much for your answers!
-
Google needs to crawl the bad pages that you 301d. If there are no live links to those pages, then Google can't find them to 301. In short, if you created new lower case URLs, you just increased your duplicate content problem.
To solve this problem, build an HTML sitemap with all of the bad URLs. Have Google fetch and submit the page and all of the pages it links to. Google will crawl all of your old pages and apply the 301s.
-
Thanks AMHC. In my case, I just don't have many back links so I don't have the urgency that you faced with getting Google to see all the redirects. But, I'm still not understanding--it sounds like you believe that once google sees the redirect it removes the old uppercase from its index. It doesn't look to me like that is what happened in my case because Google is currently indexing BOTH, and so that means it has crawled my new lowercase and I know it isn't crawling any uppercase anymore (it cant--all are redirected). So, that's why I wonder if I have to remove those uppercase urls...does that make sense or am I just not understanding it still?
EDIT: I just discovered I wasn't doing a 301 direct so it wasn't considered a permanent move. That, if I understand it right, will remove the upper case from googles index permanently.
-
Canonicals still drain link juice. Canonicals aren't like a 301. The link juice still stays on the canocalized page. All a canonical does is tell Google, in the case of duplicate content, which page is primary. Canonicals handle the duplicate content issue, they do not handle the link juice issue. If I have 2 pages: /product-name/ and /product-name=?khdfpohfo/ that are duplicates, you can via canonical, tell Google to ignore the page with the variable string and rank the page without the variable string. If the page with the variable string has links, the link juice stays on the page.
The HTML Sitemap is there to tell Google about the 301s. the sitemap would look like this:
After you do the 301 redirect, as well as set up parameters in the .htaccess file (I think - not the developer on this), everything should redirect to the lower case URL. The problem is that if you do a 301 redirect for your entire site, Google may not figure it out too quickly. When it crawls your home page downward, it's only going to see the new URLs, and can't crawl the old 301 URLs because there aren't any internal links pointing at them. The only way Google will see the 301 is via an external backlink. The way we solved this was to create an HTML sitemap of all of the old upper case URLs. We then had Google fetch and index/crawl the sitemap. As it crawls the sitemap, where all of the URLs are 301 redirects, it will likewise point all of the Link Juice at the new URLs.
-
I gotcha. Yeah, different thing going on here..these urls can be really difficult! I have uppercase lowercase, https http, urls that have different content(not just formatting) for mobile as desktop and vice versa, mobile urls that dont even exist for desktop, and desktop urls that dont exist for mobile..all under the same domain. 1000s of internal pages....In the desire to create a good website for users I've created an SEO monster because I didn't realize the many consequences with regard to search indexes.
If you know a true expert in these areas I need him/her. 4 years on this site, its live finally (2 months), and now I'm discovering all of these things have to be fixed, but i can't afford thousands of dollars..I'll do the work, I just need the knowledge!
-
I see where you are coming from, and I do not have a good answer then, when I did a lowercase redirect I started by creating the new lowercase pages then setting canonical to them. After a few months I removed the uppercase versions and redirected them to the new lowercase.
-
Hutch, thanks.
The site is dynamic with thousands of pages that are now being redirected to lower case, so I'm not seeing how using canonical would work because the upper case urls aren't on the site anymore. I guess I think of canonical as being useful when you have ongoing content on the site that duplicates one or more other pages on the same site. In my case none of the upper case urls exist anymore so they don't have 'ongoing' content. I'm still new to this so if it sounds like I have it wrong, please correct me.
-
Another quick fix would be to use a canonical tag on all of your pages pointing to the full lowercase versions.
So for the URLs example.com/UPPER; example.com/Upper; and example.com/upper you would place the following into the head so Google knows that these are just variations of the same page, and if will point search to the desired page example.com/upper
-
AMHC, thank you for your response. I'm in the middle of quite a mess, as this is one of several issues, so really appreciate your help. I must confess to not following everything you wrote exactly:
In your situation, I think i understand the redirect -- it is the same reason I am doing a redirect--it is so that anyone coming from to this site with uppercase in it will end up on the lower case page, and in the case of google will then index the page as a lower case page. BTW, for me that has been easy as I am doing it via php -- if the url doesn't equal its strtolower of the url , then I redirect to strtolower.
I think I get what you are saying about the sitemap -- it speeds up google crawling the site and seeing that all those upper cases should be lowercase from your redirect. In my case, i don't have the concern about Google discovering them as you did because my site is only a couple months old. And, I never have given Google a sitemap so many of my pages aren't crawled yet (I am trying to clean up my entire url structure before i submit a sitemap to them--however they have already crawled perhaps 20% of the site, so I'm now trying to examine what google has crawled and how it has been indexed to figure out what needs to be done).
What I'm not understanding is this: It seems to me that what you described should succeed for going forward to getting both Google and your users to the right ending page, but I don't see how it removes the prior uppercase urls from Google's index. What is it that tells Google your prior upper case urls should no longer be in their index? Is it the fact that they aren't in the sitemap you provide now? Or, do they literally have to be removed using some kind of removal or disavow tool? I discovered this (as you see in the op) because Google appears to never have removed the Uppercase ones even though they are indexing the lower case now.
Ted
-
We had the same issue. Boy, was it an education. I had no idea that URLs were case sensitive for Google, and neither did my SEO buddies. I bet if you asked 100 SEOs if URLs were case sensitive for Google, 95 would answer "No". We discovered the problem in GWT and GA when they had different statistics for the mixed case and all lower case versions of the URL. We believed that we had both a duplicate content issue as well as a link juice splitting issue, with backlinks being pointed at both URLs.
We solved the problem by doing a 301 redirect, but as we are an ecommerce site with thousands of products, it was a messy process. We had to redirect pretty much every page on the site since the mixed case categories contaminated subcategories and products.
The 301 went pretty smoothly, and we saw a minor bump up in some of our Rankings. I would strongly suggest that you create an HTML sitemap for every upper case URL that you are going to 301. Here were our thoughts - we could be wrong on this. If we just 301 a page, and don't tell Google, then Google won't know about it unless it tries to crawl the page. We felt like we needed to show Google that all of the pages are being redirected asap. Create an HTML sitemap with all of your upper case URLs. After you do the 301, have Google fetch and index the sitemap page and all of the pages that it links to. Leave the map up for a few days, and then you can take it down. This will expedite moving the link juice to the correct pages as Google will index the 301 for every page in the sitemap.
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
-
6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash
i've to give some information about my website Environment 1. i have static webpage in the root. 2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/ 3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
folder. i want to www to non on all URLs Remove index.html from url Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
without .html extension Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Some examples domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/ domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/ My code in ROOT htaccess is <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> The above code do 1. redirect www to non-www
2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
3. Remove index.html
4. Remove all .html
5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end0 -
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
301s being indexed
A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1