Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing
-
This search - site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
gives me this result from Google:
Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'. When I click to see it I get:
Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended.
I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice. Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls? And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.
-
Hi AMHC,
It makes sense that without hardly any backlinks built up Google wont find my upper case URLS since all the page links have been changed, however, I am writing out all of the urls that are redirected into email, and from that I can tell that Google is finding them--I guess they may have a list of urls from prior indexing that they crawl independent of what their crawler comes up with.
I'll keep looking to see what they have indexed and if it turns out they just aren't crawling certain pages, will put them in a sitemap to be crawled..It's a good idea for taking care of the problem quickly--so if it progresses too slowly I'll do that.
Thanks very much for your answers!
-
Google needs to crawl the bad pages that you 301d. If there are no live links to those pages, then Google can't find them to 301. In short, if you created new lower case URLs, you just increased your duplicate content problem.
To solve this problem, build an HTML sitemap with all of the bad URLs. Have Google fetch and submit the page and all of the pages it links to. Google will crawl all of your old pages and apply the 301s.
-
Thanks AMHC. In my case, I just don't have many back links so I don't have the urgency that you faced with getting Google to see all the redirects. But, I'm still not understanding--it sounds like you believe that once google sees the redirect it removes the old uppercase from its index. It doesn't look to me like that is what happened in my case because Google is currently indexing BOTH, and so that means it has crawled my new lowercase and I know it isn't crawling any uppercase anymore (it cant--all are redirected). So, that's why I wonder if I have to remove those uppercase urls...does that make sense or am I just not understanding it still?
EDIT: I just discovered I wasn't doing a 301 direct so it wasn't considered a permanent move. That, if I understand it right, will remove the upper case from googles index permanently.
-
Canonicals still drain link juice. Canonicals aren't like a 301. The link juice still stays on the canocalized page. All a canonical does is tell Google, in the case of duplicate content, which page is primary. Canonicals handle the duplicate content issue, they do not handle the link juice issue. If I have 2 pages: /product-name/ and /product-name=?khdfpohfo/ that are duplicates, you can via canonical, tell Google to ignore the page with the variable string and rank the page without the variable string. If the page with the variable string has links, the link juice stays on the page.
The HTML Sitemap is there to tell Google about the 301s. the sitemap would look like this:
After you do the 301 redirect, as well as set up parameters in the .htaccess file (I think - not the developer on this), everything should redirect to the lower case URL. The problem is that if you do a 301 redirect for your entire site, Google may not figure it out too quickly. When it crawls your home page downward, it's only going to see the new URLs, and can't crawl the old 301 URLs because there aren't any internal links pointing at them. The only way Google will see the 301 is via an external backlink. The way we solved this was to create an HTML sitemap of all of the old upper case URLs. We then had Google fetch and index/crawl the sitemap. As it crawls the sitemap, where all of the URLs are 301 redirects, it will likewise point all of the Link Juice at the new URLs.
-
I gotcha. Yeah, different thing going on here..these urls can be really difficult! I have uppercase lowercase, https http, urls that have different content(not just formatting) for mobile as desktop and vice versa, mobile urls that dont even exist for desktop, and desktop urls that dont exist for mobile..all under the same domain. 1000s of internal pages....In the desire to create a good website for users I've created an SEO monster because I didn't realize the many consequences with regard to search indexes.
If you know a true expert in these areas I need him/her. 4 years on this site, its live finally (2 months), and now I'm discovering all of these things have to be fixed, but i can't afford thousands of dollars..I'll do the work, I just need the knowledge!
-
I see where you are coming from, and I do not have a good answer then, when I did a lowercase redirect I started by creating the new lowercase pages then setting canonical to them. After a few months I removed the uppercase versions and redirected them to the new lowercase.
-
Hutch, thanks.
The site is dynamic with thousands of pages that are now being redirected to lower case, so I'm not seeing how using canonical would work because the upper case urls aren't on the site anymore. I guess I think of canonical as being useful when you have ongoing content on the site that duplicates one or more other pages on the same site. In my case none of the upper case urls exist anymore so they don't have 'ongoing' content. I'm still new to this so if it sounds like I have it wrong, please correct me.
-
Another quick fix would be to use a canonical tag on all of your pages pointing to the full lowercase versions.
So for the URLs example.com/UPPER; example.com/Upper; and example.com/upper you would place the following into the head so Google knows that these are just variations of the same page, and if will point search to the desired page example.com/upper
-
AMHC, thank you for your response. I'm in the middle of quite a mess, as this is one of several issues, so really appreciate your help. I must confess to not following everything you wrote exactly:
In your situation, I think i understand the redirect -- it is the same reason I am doing a redirect--it is so that anyone coming from to this site with uppercase in it will end up on the lower case page, and in the case of google will then index the page as a lower case page. BTW, for me that has been easy as I am doing it via php -- if the url doesn't equal its strtolower of the url , then I redirect to strtolower.
I think I get what you are saying about the sitemap -- it speeds up google crawling the site and seeing that all those upper cases should be lowercase from your redirect. In my case, i don't have the concern about Google discovering them as you did because my site is only a couple months old. And, I never have given Google a sitemap so many of my pages aren't crawled yet (I am trying to clean up my entire url structure before i submit a sitemap to them--however they have already crawled perhaps 20% of the site, so I'm now trying to examine what google has crawled and how it has been indexed to figure out what needs to be done).
What I'm not understanding is this: It seems to me that what you described should succeed for going forward to getting both Google and your users to the right ending page, but I don't see how it removes the prior uppercase urls from Google's index. What is it that tells Google your prior upper case urls should no longer be in their index? Is it the fact that they aren't in the sitemap you provide now? Or, do they literally have to be removed using some kind of removal or disavow tool? I discovered this (as you see in the op) because Google appears to never have removed the Uppercase ones even though they are indexing the lower case now.
Ted
-
We had the same issue. Boy, was it an education. I had no idea that URLs were case sensitive for Google, and neither did my SEO buddies. I bet if you asked 100 SEOs if URLs were case sensitive for Google, 95 would answer "No". We discovered the problem in GWT and GA when they had different statistics for the mixed case and all lower case versions of the URL. We believed that we had both a duplicate content issue as well as a link juice splitting issue, with backlinks being pointed at both URLs.
We solved the problem by doing a 301 redirect, but as we are an ecommerce site with thousands of products, it was a messy process. We had to redirect pretty much every page on the site since the mixed case categories contaminated subcategories and products.
The 301 went pretty smoothly, and we saw a minor bump up in some of our Rankings. I would strongly suggest that you create an HTML sitemap for every upper case URL that you are going to 301. Here were our thoughts - we could be wrong on this. If we just 301 a page, and don't tell Google, then Google won't know about it unless it tries to crawl the page. We felt like we needed to show Google that all of the pages are being redirected asap. Create an HTML sitemap with all of your upper case URLs. After you do the 301, have Google fetch and index the sitemap page and all of the pages that it links to. Leave the map up for a few days, and then you can take it down. This will expedite moving the link juice to the correct pages as Google will index the 301 for every page in the sitemap.
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
-
How to Get Permalinks Indexed?
Hey Everyone, I'm so happy to be apart of this community and assert knowledge where and when I can. I joined the community for one specific reason and I hope to employ the help of everyone here in conjunction with solving my SEO problem. I have a few years experience in SEO/SEM and have been continuously learning, while learning to adapt to continuous changes (I think we can all relate lol). At any rate, here is what I am experiencing frustration with. I'm the SEO Analyst for a company that is trying to compete for the keyword phrase "Lyft Promo Code". We have been trying to place page one on google for over a year now to no avail. I have gotten my direct domain url to appear on pages 1 & 2, but can't seem to get permalinks or "Sub-URL's" indexed. If you google this phrase you will see what I mean. The top result is:http://rideshareapps.com/lyft-promo-code-credit/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Number_One_Deisgns
This url has an aggregated rating and appears page one for the phrase aforementioned above. What we have managed to do, as I mentioned is get www.couponcodeshero.com on page two. However, we have noticed that the page one trend is all permalinks. However when we have tried to emulate the pages structure and index priority, we are unable too. Our page:
http://couponcodeshero.com/lyft-promo-code-rideshare-guide/ I have ran multiple on-page graders from many resources and have not been able to get this page indexed as a permalink on any page that directly correlates with the Keyword Phrase. In essence, I'm looking for some direction from individuals who may have experienced this before. I have spent a good amount of time Googling and searching forum databases but can not find any direct content that explains how to index a permalink. I hope to get some great ideas from the individuals here! If you do know of any articles or even previously answered questions here please direct me there. it is only my intention to add value to the community! Schieler Mew
Number One Designs0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
Canonical or No-index
Just a quick question really. Say I have a Promotions page where I list all current promotions for a product, and update it regularly to reflect the latest offer codes etc. On top of that I have Offer announcement posts for specific promotions for that product, highlighting very briefly the promotion, but also linking back to the main product promotion page which has a the promotion duplicated. So main page is 1000+ words with half a dozen promotions, the small post might be 200 words, and quickly become irrelevant as it is a limited time news article. Now, I don't want the promotion page indexed (unless it has a larger news story attached to the promotion, but for this purpose presume it is doesn't). Initially the core essence of the post will be duplicated in the main Promotion page, but later as the offer expires it wouldn't be. Therefore would you Rel Canonical or just simply No-index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheWebMastercom0 -
URL construction in 2014
Hey guys, I was wondering if you could tell me your thoughts about how a URL is perceived by the algo in 2014? For example: http://www.moneyexpert.com/reviews/credit-cards/amex-platinum/ and lets say http://www.moneyexpert.com/reviews_credit-cards_review_amex-platinum.html In the eyes of google do both different style of url generally help google understand the same result? or will the keyword rich html url have a bigger benefit? I am looking forward to your advice on this matter. I don't plan on doing a lot of SEO but rather letting nature take its course so to speak... so i just wanted to make sure i construct this site with 'best practice'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irdeto0 -
Is it a problem that Google's index shows paginated page urls, even with canonical tags in place?
Since Google shows more pages indexed than makes sense, I used Google's API and some other means to get everything Google has in its index for a site I'm working on. The results bring up a couple of oddities. It shows a lot of urls to the same page, but with different tracking code.The url with tracking code always follows a question mark and could look like: http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example http://www.MozExampleURL.com?another-tracking-examle http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example-3 etc So, the only thing that distinguishes one url from the next is a tracking url. On these pages, canonical tags are in place as: <link rel="canonical<a class="attribute-value">l</a>" href="http://www.MozExampleURL.com" /> So, why does the index have urls that are only different in terms of tracking urls? I would think it would ignore everything, starting with the question mark. The index also shows paginated pages. I would think it should show the one canonical url and leave it at that. Is this a problem about which something should be done? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Do I even bother to remove links
Hi, I'm noticing increasing numbers of scraped directory links pointing back to the websites I manage. Much of this info appears to be scraped from a well known (and respected) directory. I don't build links to an of the websites I manage - and none have more than 200 linking root domains currently - not that many. The problem is I focus on quality links and the scraped links are incredibly weak on the whole. Diluting the quality links. I've noticed a certain paranoia in the SEO community about removing / disavowing links, and yet I'm tempted to ignore the rubbish (unless part of a major negative SEO push) and just get on with the job, focusing on quality content that drives natural links, and social media work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Removed Duplicate Domains, What Should I Expect?
Hi All, So I have been at my current company for 5 months now. I quickly realized that they previously bought multiple domains. The domains do make sense (they are mostly our products, etc). However they did not just redirect to our main website, instead, they were a direct copy of our main website. They had it setup so that when we made changes to our main website, www.mainwebsite.com, that the same exact change went to www.productwebsite.com. Basically we had about 7 of the SAME EXACT websites with a different root domain. So I explained to them the problem with having duplicate content on the web and how we are basically just self cannibalizing our online efforts. This problem is fixed now and I am just wondering if anybody has seen the results before? To tell you the truth we already do pretty well SEO-wise. Just wondering if this will make it even better? I am assuming that this will also take a little while to take effect? Thanks! Pat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0