Upper to Lower Case and Endless Redirects
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I have a site that first got indexed about a year ago for several months. I shut it down and opened it up again about 5 months ago. 2 months ago I discovered that the upper case in the pages: www.site.com/some-detail/Bizname/product was a no-no. There are no backlinks to these pages yet, so for search engines I put in 301 redirects to the lower case version thinking after a few weeks Bing and Google would figure it out and no longer try to crawl them. FYI there are thousands of these pages, and they are dynamically created.
Well, 2 months later google is still crawling the upper case urls even though it appears that only the lower case are in the index (from when I do a site:www.site.com/some-detail ) search.
Bing is also crawling the upper case although I'm not seeing any of the upper case pages and only a small percentage of the lower case ones show using a site:www.site.com/details.... command
Assuming there are no backlinks will they eventually stop crawling those uppercase pages? If not, again assuming there are no backlinks, should I 410 the upper case pages, or will that remove any credit I am getting for the page having existed for over a year prior to changing the upper to lower?
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I'd give the sitemap a submission as soon as you get the URLs cleaned up. That should really help. Cheers!
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Hi Ryan,
The sitemap has yet to be submitted as I've been cleaning up url issues first. However, Google has crawled 15,000 pages anyway, and Bing several thousand. Everything is lowercase on the site now, and there are only 9 backlinks (all no-follow) from just 2 domains, as I haven't yet started building them. I'll wait a couple more months and see if the number gets closer to zero,.
Thanks. Ted -
Which ones are in your sitemap, uppercase or lowercase? Have you double checked any and all internal links on your site to make sure everything is lowercase? Are there other sites out there pointing to uppercase? Are you 100% certain of a complete purge?
If you are, then they should eventually stop crawling the uppercase. Still, having them crawl the upper case and receive a 301 redirect doesn't involve much bandwidth.
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