All Caps in URL
-
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.
-
Thanks for the quick replies guys!
-
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)
-
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?
-
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
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
-
Redirect chains error on the home page URL
Hello Everyone, I'm getting redirect chains error on the home page URL:
On-Page Optimization | | Nikhil_Falcon
http://ebitdacatalyst.com in Wordpress. I've checked my redirection list in the plugin, and haven't found any redirections on http://ebitdacatalyst.com. Can anyone please help me in solving this issue? I don't know where from it's coming.0 -
Optimal URL structure for location-specific pages
I'm in the middle of revamping a website for a restaurant that has multiple locations and am trying to decide what the best URL/internal link structure would be. Right now, each restaurant has a single location page, but we are going to add additional pages for catering. Sitewide-linked pages exist for /catering and /locationname. The way I see it, we have two basic options: Option #1: Catering page - /locationname/catering/ Option #2: Catering page - /catering/locationname/ In both cases, there would be links from the /locationname an /catering pages to the location-specific catering pages. Is either option preferable to the other?
On-Page Optimization | | mblair0 -
Do parameters in a URL make a difference from an SEO point of view
We us a number of different parameters in a number of our URLs to track how the user has navigated to the page. So for example we will have a page www.example.com/product/?banner to show that the user has navigated to the page from the banner as opposed to www.example.com/product/?footer to show that the user has navigated to the page from the footer. Do search engines treat these pages as the same page or different pages? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | cbarron0 -
Canonical URL, cornerstone page and categories
If I want to have a cornerstone "page", can I substitute an actual page with a category archive of posts "page" (that contains many posts containing the target key phrase)? This way, if I make blog posts about a certain topic/ key phrase (example "beach weddings") and add a canonical URL of the category archive page to the individual posts, am I right then to assume google will see the archive page as the cornerstone page (and thereby won't see the individual posts with the same key phrase as competing)?
On-Page Optimization | | stephanwb0 -
New CMS system - 100,000 old urls - use robots.txt to block?
Hello. My website has recently switched to a new CMS system. Over the last 10 years or so, we've used 3 different CMS systems on our current domain. As expected, this has resulted in lots of urls. Up until this most recent iteration, we were unable to 301 redirect or use any page-level indexation techniques like rel 'canonical' Using SEOmoz's tools and GWMT, I've been able to locate and redirect all pertinent, page-rank bearing, "older" urls to their new counterparts..however, according to Google Webmaster tools 'Not Found' report, there are literally over 100,000 additional urls out there it's trying to find. My question is, is there an advantage to using robots.txt to stop search engines from looking for some of these older directories? Currently, we allow everything - only using page level robots tags to disallow where necessary. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
No Data Available for this URL
Hi,
On-Page Optimization | | ostiguyj
I really don't understand why I have this message "No data available for this URL"
in my SEOMOZ campain. (www.bienchezsoi.ca) When I look at my page rank, I get a score of 0 I have no idea of to fix it. Please help. Thanks0 -
Is it good to have dashes in url's
When using keywords in url's for internal pages, isn't it a good idea to use dashes or underscores in the url between the keywords?
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0 -
What is the best practice for changing a url of an existing page
I a looking through the on-page SEO reports in SEOmoz for one of my sites. It suggests that I change the url of a particular page to match the desired search term I want to rank for. In this case it is a site for a local business and the url is example.com/testimonials. when it probabaly should have instead been example.com/city-business-reviews. I have just a couple links to this page and I'm stuck towards the bottom of page 1 in the SERPs currently. Questions... 1. Should I change the url to include the exact keyword term I want the page to rank for? 2. If yes, what is the best method to ensure that any existing link juice to the current url is retained? Would I change the url, then create a new page with the old url and apply a 301 redirect to point it to the new page? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | fastestmanalive0