All Caps in URL

[interactivek]

Hello, we're working with a corporate client to make changes to their URL structure. We recommended that they use a structure like "domain.com/state/city/location". Their IT department is on board, but they just mentioned that all of the state and city info will be pulled from a database where it is all caps.

So it would be like this "domain.com/STATE/CITY/location"

I'm concerned that it may be spammy, but I can't find any definitive information online. We usually like to test issues like this on our own sites before advising clients, but we're working up against a quick deadline.

Any help with this issue would be great, especially real world experience, not just theories. Thank you.

[interactivek]

Thanks for the quick replies guys!

[wissamdandan]

Its no Spammy, but in the long term, people will link to you using the lowercase URLs and u may risk a duplicate content issue.

If you have full access to Apache configuration,

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap  lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

(you need to define RewriteMap in HTTPD config so you can call it out from htaccess)

[interactivek]

Thanks Damien, that's a good technical solution. Unfortunately, we don't control the site and in order to recommend a technical change, I would need some rationale as to why an upper case URL is not good from an SEO standpoint (I can think of a few non-seo reasons they should not do this). Any ideas on that?

[krissy-cca]

You can use a rewrite rule to change all the upper case letters to lower case. This should solve your problem before they are indexed and will do away with the need to 301 every upper case URL to a lower case one.

DD