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
-
Content incorrectly being duplicated on microsite
So bear with me here as this is probably a technical issue and i am not that technical. We have a microsite for one of our partner organisations and recently we have detected that content from our main site appearing in the URLs for the microsite - both in search results and then when you click through to the SERP. However, this content does not exist on the actual website at all. Anyone have a possible explanation for this? I have tried searching the web but nothing. I assume there is something in the set up of the microsite that is associating it with the content on the main site.
Technical SEO | | Discovery_SA0 -
Does adding a noindex tag reduce duplicate content?
I've been working under the assumption for some time that if I have two (or more) pages which are very similar that I can add a noindex tag to the pages I don't need and that will reduce duplicate content. As far as I know this removes the pages with the tag from Google's index and stops any potential issues with duplicate content. It's the second part of that assumption that i'm now questioning. Despite pages having the noindex tag they continue to appear in Google Search console as duplicate content, soft 404 etc. That is, new pages are appearing regularly that I know to have the noindex tag. My thoughts on this so far are that Google can still crawl these pages (although won't index them) so shows them in GSC due to a crude issue flagging process. I mainly want to know: a) Is the actual Google algorithm sophisticated enough to ignore these pages even through GSC doesn't. b) How do I explain this to a client.
Technical SEO | | ChrisJFoster0 -
Showing duplicate content when I have canonical url set, why?
Just inspecting my sites report and I see that I have a lot of duplicate content issues, not sure why these two pages here http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/small-wholesale-patches-1/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch are showing as duplicate content when both pages have a clearly defined canonical url of http://www.thecheapplace.com/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch Any answer would be appreciated, thank you
Technical SEO | | erhansimavi0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report
In Crawl Diagnostics Summary, I have 2000 duplicate page content. When I click the link, my Wordpress return "page not found" and I see it's not indexed by Google, and I could not find the issue in Google Webmaster. So where does this link come from?
Technical SEO | | smallwebsite0 -
Category URL Duplicate Content
I've recently been hired as the web developer for a company with an existing web site. Their web architecture includes category names in product urls, and of course we have many products in multiple categories thus generating duplicate content. According to the SEOMoz Site Crawl, we have roughly 1600 pages of duplicate content, I expect primarily from this issue. This is out of roughly 3600 pages crawled. My questions are: 1. Fixing this for the long term will obviously mean restructuring the URLs for the site. Is this worthwhile and what will the ramifications be of performing such a move? 2. How can I determine the level and extent of the effects of this duplicated content? 3. Is it possible the best course of action is to do nothing? The site has many, many other issues, and I'm not sure how highly to prioritize this problem. In addition, the IT man is highly doubtful this is causing an SEO issue, and I'm going to need to be able to back up any action I request. I do feel I will need to strongly justify any possible risks this level of site change could cause. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any more information is needed.
Technical SEO | | MagnetsUSA0 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0 -
About duplicate content
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website. Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example, http://www.mysite/blue/ http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is, what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag? Wich url will be consider for main url, Thanks for yor help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0