Duplicate title tags being caused by upper case and lower case version of urls'

[Dan-Lawrence]

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

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Tom

Sorry to be a pain but please can you confirm re my latest question/comment reply to yours, i.e. does your advice still stand if client on a windows server (since i dont think have .htaccess files or do/can they?)

And if not then is there a similar course of action that can be taken ?

Cheers

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Many Thanks Raymond !

All Best

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

That great Tom thanks alot for your advice !

Clients on a windows server, am i right in thinking they dont have htaccess files since they are just on apache ?

If so is principle/code the same and just done in a different file ? if so any ideas what that file is ? or am i mistaken and windows do have htaccess files ?

Cheers

Dan

[TomRayner]

Hi Dan

I wouldn't want to leave anything to doubt and would prefer to have 1 version of each URL available.

Fortunately, a fairly simple solution can be put in place in your htaccess file.  As always, please backup and test before trying any implementation - I can't tell you how many times I've made a simple mistake in the htaccess file that causes big problems!

Anyway, the code you'd want to enter at the top of the file is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap  lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

That code will basically rewrite any URL containing uppercase letters to the same URL using only lowercase.

Redirects are quicker and more reliable than canonical tags in my experience and this doesn't take long to get implemented, so best not leave anything to chance.

Hope this helps.

[rayvensoft]

GWT sometimes takes a while to register the change.  It just actually happened on one of my clients pages where there was a bug in the code made by the developer and they got 30,000 duplicate title and description errors.  It was fixed about 2 months ago and while the errors have dropped to 2000 or so, it is still not at zero yet, so it does take some time depending on how often Google crawls the site.

If the developer says they did it, I would recommend the first thing you do is simply check that they did it.  Go to one of the pages in question, both one with capital and without, and do a view source on both to check that the rel="canonical" tag is there and is correct.  Programmers don't always know much about SEO so they may be implementing them wrong.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Raymond

The developers are saying they have done this

Does that mean that if its showing in GWT it hasnt been done ?

Cheers

Dan

[rayvensoft]

As a simpler solution, why don't you just add a rel="canonical" tag to each page specifying the one you want?  That should take care of any duplicate content issues.

I hope this helps.