Capital Letters in URLS?
-
Remove
-
Having Capital letters in the URLs are not bad for SEO, Google consider this case as negative seo and it will not affect your ranking, but i recommend to use lower case in URL because it is User-friendly and SE friendly, and may be possible that you will have duplicate content issue if search engine see variations of upper and lower case among URLs that all evidently point to the same content. Read matt cutts's advices on URL http://www.seosean.com/blog/matt-cutts-advice-on-urls-page-names
-
I agree with Neil. It's not bad, just a good user practice to keep them lowercase so that's there's no confusion. The best bet for you would to be to use a consistent format and mimic that in your canonical URLs so only that variation gets crawled and indexed.
-
Whilst it's not necessarily "bad" per se, the implications are, so this kind of canonicalisation issue needs to be taken care of using URL rewrites/permanent 301 redirects.
Typically, on a Windows-based server (without any URL rewriting), a 200 (OK) status code will be returned for each version regardless of the combination of upper/lower-case letters used - giving search engines duplicate content to index, and others duplicate content to link to. This naturally dilutes rankings and link equity across the two (or more) identical pages.
There is an excellent section on solving canonicalisation issues on Windows IIS servers in this SEOmoz article by Dave Sottimano.
On a Linux server (without any URL rewriting) you will usually get a 200 for the lower-case version, and a 404 (Not Found) for versions with upper-case characters. Whilst search engines wont index the 404, you are potentially wasting link equity passed to non-existent pages, and it can be really confusing for users, too.
There is a lot of info around the web about solving Linux canonicalisation issues (here is an article from YouMoz). If your site uses a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress, most of these issues are solved using the default .htaccess file, and completely eliminated when you combine this with a well chosen extension or two.
You can help the search engines figure out which version of a page you regard as the original by using the rel="canonical" meta tag in the html . This passes link equity and rankings from duplicate versions to the main, absolute version.
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
-
Ranking gone for the original page and a shortened url ranks instead.
Hi Experts!!! Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year In Advance. I am been facing a issue with a few of my SERP results for "Singapore Visa" and related keyword. Until last to last Saturday i.e 16th December, I ranked for Singapore visa keyword with this url https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx !!! But since 18th December I am ranking for "Singapore Visa" keyword with this url and message below it in place of description. Singapore visa - Musafir.com
Algorithm Updates | | sainath
go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa
No information is available for this page.
Learn why The go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa redirects to https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx with some UTM parameters. The URL go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa is a shortened URL which was used for SMS marketing and all of a sudden Google has picked it in SERP instead of Singapore VIsa Landing Page. The Singapore visa Main page is not blocked by Robots.txt file. Please help me to resolve this.1 -
Can hreflang tags still work when the Alternate URL is 301 redirecting to a translated URL in Japanese Characters?
My organization has several international sites 4 of them of which have translated URLs in either Japanese, Traditional Chinese, German & Canadian French. The hreflang tags we have set up on our United States look something like this: But when you actually go to http://www.domain.co.jp/it-security/ you are 301 redirected to the translated URL version: www.domain.co.jp/it-セキュリティ/
Algorithm Updates | | brantmk
My question is, will Google still understand that the translated URL is the Alternate URL, or will this present errors? The hreflang tags are automated for each of our pages and would technically be hard to populate the hreflang with the translated URL version. However we could potentially make the hreflang something customized on a page level basis.0 -
Canonical URLs being ignored?
Hi Guys, Has anybody noticed canonical URLs being ignored where they were previously obeyed? I have a site that is doing this at the moment and just wondered if this was being seen elsewhere and if anyone knows what the solution is? Thanks, Elias
Algorithm Updates | | A_Q0 -
Does having a few URLs pointing to another url via 301 "create" duplicate content?
Hello! I have a few URLs all related to the same business sector. Can I point them all at my home domain or should I point them to different relevant content within it? Ioan
Algorithm Updates | | IoanSaid1 -
Keyword stuffing in URL? Ekk. Help Please.
Okay, so I work as content manager in the travel industry and we're re-doing our site, pretty much from scratch, including the SEO, anchor text/route url, etc. I am struggling with one particular thing. If all my url's have similar keywords, ie example.com/atlanta-trip and example.com/boston-trip and so on and so forth for every destination, will using "trip" in the url be seen by Google as keyword stuffing? Should I make my url's more diverse? My gut feeling is no based on all the Moz, Google and other SEO research I've done, because it's all relevant to the content and the user experience, but I'd like to be sure, since we really can't afford to get penalized by Google...again.
Algorithm Updates | | hpeisach0 -
URL Names not so important in future?
I read somewhere (hard to say where with all the information about SEO and google!) that in the future, Google will put less importance on the URL name for ranking purposes. Any thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | Llanero0 -
URL is starting to appear capitalized in Google Search Results. How come?
Our domain (www.absoluteautomation.com) has just today started appearing in search results as www.AbsoluteAutomation.com. Any ideas why?
Algorithm Updates | | absoauto0 -
The related: query for one of my urls makes no sense
I'm trying to compete regarding keyword X. Currently, I'm on first page, 7-8th position. If, for each one of the urls listed in first page for such keyword, I search for related:[url], I get similar results for all of them, but mine. Mine shows inconsistent results, none of which related to the same topic as the other 9 in the top 10. Looking at them, the only hypothesis I am able to formulate is that, somehow, google is linking the url to its paid banners in big media. However, such banners go through an adserver and/or are declared as nofollow. Is there any obvious reason that could be causing this? I wonder if we are on page 1 even though we're considered pretty-much 'off-topic' regarding the keyword.
Algorithm Updates | | jleanv240