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
-
Placement of /p/ in URL structure for ecommerce site product URLs
Hi, We're a discussion about how to structure a clients ecommerce site product page URLs where 12345 represent the product SKU/number: https://domain.com/Item--i-12345 https://domain.com/product-name/p/12345 https://domain.com/p/12345 It's a toss up between the second and the third URL, but the SEO company is saying the third is best because of the placement with the /p/ and creating a silo for "products" that help search engines recognize it is a product. Does anyone have thoughts on this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | AliMac260 -
How Google's "Temporarily remove URLs" in search console works?
Hi, We have created new sub-domain with new content which we want to highlight for users. But our old content from different sub-domain is making top on google results with reputation. How can we highlight new content and suppress old sub-domain in results? Many pages have related title tags and other information in similar. We are planing to hide URLs from Google search console, so slowly new pages will attain the traffic. How does it works?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
301 redirect to URL plus anchor tag???
Hi - my company has just had a site redesign completed, and our "old" site we have landing pages for a full product line. The new design has taken the content from those landing pages and placed them into one long scrolling page. We currently rank well on the "old" landing pages but now all that content is contained in a single page with anchor tags throughout attached to the headings. Can you set up 301's to anchor tags? Example: old site www.mysite.com/products/automotive/auto-parts.html new site: www.mysite.com/products/automotive#auto-parts
Algorithm Updates | | Jenny10 -
How Additional Characters and Numbers in URL affect SEO
Hi fellow SEOmozers, I noticed that a lot of websites have additional characters and words at the end of the URL in addition keyword optimized URL. Mostly for E-Commerce sites For example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj or wwww.yoursite.com/category/keyword#83939=-37292 My question is how does the additional characters or parameters(not necessarily tracking parameters) affect SEO? Does it matter if i have additional keywords in the additional stuff in the URL (1st url example)? If you can provide more information, that would be helpful. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | TommyTan0 -
Increased 404 and Blocked URL Notifications in Webmaster Tools
In the last 45 days, I am receiving an increasing number of 404 alerts in Google Webmaster Tools. When I audit the notifications, they are not "new" broken links, these are all links that have been pointing to non-existent pages for years that for some reason Google is just notifying me about them. This has also coincided with about a 30% drop in organic traffic from late April to early May. The site is www.petersons.com and its been around for a while and the site attracts a fair amount of natural links so in the 2 years I've managed the campaign I've done very little link-building. I'm in the process of setting up redirects for these urls but why is Google now notifying me of years old broken links and could that be one of the reasons for my drop in traffic. My second issue is my I am being notified that I am blocking over 8,000 urls in my Robots file when I am not. I attached a screenshot. Here is a link to a screenshot. http://i.imgur.com/ncoERgV.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | CUnet0 -
SERP Rankings: Breadcrumb appears near URL
Hi mozzers, I was checking at the "carpet cleaning" kw national search and an usual result appeared(image attached): -Title Tag -Url + Breadcrumbs following The Breadcrumb showing up near the url is the first time I see that happening! Anyone has an idea why? Do you think it is a Google new trick or do you guys think it is the webmaster who added a hack to it? Thanks for letting me know Tf52L.png
Algorithm Updates | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
What is the best url format ?
hello, I have the multiple site with file format url like contact-us.php, search.php, index.html But now i am going to update my site using any framework such as yii, cakephp, now i need the best suggestion, i wanted to create the seo friendly site, so what is the best format for ulr, 1. file format such as contact-us.php, index.html, about-us.html [or] 2. path based url such as contact-us/ , about-my-company/ [or] 3. path based without slash like contact-us, about-my-company Please provide me the best solution for above Thanks Alex
Algorithm Updates | | massimobrogi0 -
Regarding site url structure
OK so there are already some answers to questions similar to this but mine might be a little more specific. OK website is www.bestlifeint.com Most of our product pages are as such: http://www.bestlifeint.com/products-soy.html for instance. However I was trying to help the SEO for certain pages (namely two) with the URL's and had some success with another page our Soy Meal Replacement I changed the site URL of this page from www.bestlifeint.com/products-meal to www.bestlifeint.com/Soy-Amazing-Meal-Replacement-with-Omega-3s.html (notice I dropped the /product part of url and made it more seo friendly. The old page for this page was something like www.bestlifeint.com/products-meal The issue is that recently this new page and another page I have changed http://www.bestlifeint.com/Whey-Milk-Alternative.html I have dropped the "/product" on the URL even though they are both products. The new Meal Replacement page used to be ranked like 6th on google at the begining of the month and now is like 48th or something. The new "whey milk" page (http://www.bestlifeint.com/Whey-Milk-Alternative.html) is ranked like 45th or something for "Whey Milk" when the old page...."products/wheyrice.html" was ranked around 18th or so at the begining of the month. Have I hurt these two pages by not following www.bestlifeint.com/product.... site structure? And focusing more on the URL SEO? I have both NEW pages receiving all link juice inside web site so they are the new pages (can not go to old page) and recently seeing that google has pretty much dropped the old pages in search rankings I have deleted these two pages. Do i just need to just wait and see? According to my research we should rank much higher for "Whey Milk" we should be on the first page according to googles own statements of searchers finding good relevant material. Any advice moving forward? Thanks, Brian
Algorithm Updates | | SammisBest0