URL Mixed Cases and Duplicate Content
-
Hi There,
I have a question for you. I am working on a website where by typing any letter of the URL in lower or upper case, it will give a 200 code.
Examples
www.examples.com/page1/product
www.examples.com/paGe1/Product
www.examples.com/PagE1/prOdUcT
www.examples.com/pAge1/proODUCt
and so on…
Although I cannot find evidence of backlinks pointing to my page with mixed cases, shall I redirect or rel=canonical all the possible combination of the cases to a lower version of them in order to prevent duplicate content? And if so, do you have any advice on how to complete such a massive job?
Thanks a lot
-
Thank you guys! Very helpful answers. Take care
-
Hi,
Technically this is duplicate content, but it is most likely something search engines understand to ignore (especially if no links point to the upper case / incorrect URLs). If it particularly bothers you, place a self-referencing canonical tag in the page's file so that www.examples.com/pAGe/PROducT references www.examples.com/page/product in its tag. Either that or a 301.
Cheers.
-
Have a look around many other sites, and they all do the same. Do a search for something in Google and then change the case of anything after the domain. Microsoft is the same. I am sure that there are examples that will 404 these requests, and that will then be a server side setting.
I really wouldn't worry about that though. MOZ is the same as well. Upper or lower case will give you the same page. in the last 15 years of SEO, I have never come across this as an issue
-Andy
-
It makes more sense to make a server level rule that will 301 any mixed case to a lower so if a URL is being accessed on anything other than lowercase it will redirect to the lower case URL.
This should save you some effort in the long run.
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
-
Duplicate Content and Subdirectories
Hi there and thank you in advance for your help! I'm seeking guidance on how to structure a resources directory (white papers, webinars, etc.) while avoiding duplicate content penalties. If you go to /resources on our site, there is filter function. If you filter for webinars, the URL becomes /resources/?type=webinar We didn't want that dynamic URL to be the primary URL for webinars, so we created a new page with the URL /resources/webinar that lists all of our webinars and includes a featured webinar up top. However, the same webinar titles now appear on the /resources page and the /resources/webinar page. Will that cause duplicate content issues? P.S. Not sure if it matters, but we also changed the URLs for the individual resource pages to include the resource type. For example, one of our webinar URLs is /resources/webinar/forecasting-your-revenue Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SAIM_Marketing0 -
Gallery Causing Duplicate Content Issues
Hi! I have a gallery on my website. When you click to view the next image it goes to a new page but the content is exactly the same as the first page. This is flagging up a duplicate content issue. What is the best way to fix this? Add a canonical tag to page 2,3,4 or add a noindex tag? I have found a lot of conflicting answers. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | emma19860 -
Duplicate title tags being caused by upper case and lower case version of urls'
Hi GWT is reporting lots of duplicate titles for a clients new site. Mainly these are due to 2x different versions of the url, one with words starting with an upper case character and the other all lower case. Clients dev saying this has something to do with windows server and is ok! Is this correct or should i be telling them to delete and then 301 redirect all upper case versions to the lower case (since lower case better practice) and that will deal with the reported dupe titles ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Multiple Sites Duplicate Content Best Practice
Hi there, I have one client (atlantawidgets.com) who has a main site. But also has duplicate sites with different urls targeting specific geo areas. I.e. (widgetmakersinmarietta.com) Would it be best to go ahead and create a static home page at these add'l sites and make the rest of the site be nonindexed? Or should I go in and allow more pages to be indexed and change the content? If so how many, 3, 5, 8? I don't have tons of time at this point. 3)If I change content within the duplicate sites, what % do I need to change. Does switching the order of the sentences of the content count? Or does it need to be 100%fresh? Thanks everyone.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
Hi, I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties. While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc. 1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content... 2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text? 3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Cross-domain duplicate content issue
Hey all, Just double-checking something. Here's the issue, briefly. One of my clients is a large law firm. The firm has a main site, and an additional site for an office in Atlanta. On the main site, there is a list of all attorneys and links to their profiles (that they wrote themselves). The Atlanta site has this as well, but lists only the attorneys located in that office. I would like to have the profiles for the Atlanta lawyers on both sites. Would rel=canonical work to avoid a dupe-content smackdown? The profiles should rank for Atlanta over the main site. This just means that G will drop the main site's profiles (for those attorneys) from their index, correct? No other weird side effects? I hope I worded all that clearly!
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Duplicate Content within Website - problem?
Hello everyone, I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets. However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say) My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation. So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc. I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc. Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles. So... what do I do with the content. Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages. I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content. One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be. Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify. Thanks so much in advance David
Technical SEO | | OzDave0 -
Duplicate content connundrum
Hey Mozzers- I have a tricky situation with one of my clients. They're a reputable organization and have been mentioned in several major news articles. They want to create a Press page on their site with links to each article, but they want viewers to remain within the site and not be redirected to the press sites themselves. The other issue is some of the articles have been removed from the original press sites where they were first posted. I want to avoid duplicate content issues, but I don't see how to repost the articles within the client's site. I figure I have 3 options: 1. create PDFs (w/SEO-friendly URLs) with the articles embedded in them that open in a new window. 2. Post an image with screenshot of article on a unique URL w/brief content. 3. Copy and paste the article to a unique URL. If anyone has experience with this issue or any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Jaime Brown
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0