Upper to Lower Case and Endless Redirects
-
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?
-
I'd give the sitemap a submission as soon as you get the URLs cleaned up. That should really help. Cheers!
-
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.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Adventurous 301 redirection chain
Picture this - if you have a spirit for adventure! Client builds Alpha****Domain.com Then builds a number of backlinks to Alpha****Domain.com Client also creates a number of 301 redirects from several older domains to AlphaDomain.com Client then changes Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com They create 301 redirects from Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com But then... they 'park' Alpha****Domain.com (ie. no longer accessible)! About one year later, client changes a whole bunch of URLs on Beta****Domain.com without keeping track of changes. Thankfully, the hosting service (Shopify) automatically creates some redirects, but it's more by accident than design! Questions: After step 6 above, are the 301 redirects created in steps 3 and 5 now totally redundant and broken? If AlphaDomain.com no longer exists, surely all redirects to and from this domain are broken? Or can they be recovered? What happens to all the backlinks originally created in step 2? Finally, can anything be done to recover lost URLs in step 7? Yes. What a mess!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Clarity needed on 301 redirects
Looking to get a bit of clarity on redirects: We're getting ready to launch a new website with a simplified url structure (we're consolidating pages & content) & I already know that I'll have to employ 301 redirects from the old url structure to the new. What I'm not clear about is how specifc I should be. Here's an example of my file structure: Old website: www.website.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSimmons17
New website: www.website.com Old website: www.website.com/vacations
New website: www.website.com/vacations Old website: www.website.com/vacations/costa-rica
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/costa-rica/guanacaste
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/mexico
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/mexico/cancun
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/bolivia
New website: www.website.com/vacations/south-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/bolivia/la-paz
New website: www.website.com/vacations/south-america Do I need to redirect each and every page or would just redirecting just the folder be enough to keep my SEO juice? Many thanks in advance for any help!0 -
Homepage 302 Redirect For SSL
Hi All, My site, http://domain.com, currently has a 302 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com. The reason we have an SSL cert is because we have a registration and log in form on the homepage (as well as log in options in the top bar of every page on the site - email/password). My question is: When taking SEO best practices into account, would we be better having a 301 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com as most of our inbound links are directed to http://domain.com. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rogs.SEO0 -
ISAPI Redirect in httpd.ini doc
Hi folks, Due to working on a site older than myself, I find myself in a position whereby I need to set up some redirects in the httpd.ini document. I had wrongly assumed this would be in the same way as I would in htaccess, but alas, no dice. There's nothing special about what I'm trying to do, but I think the expressions are what are confusing me. I'm trying to redirect this example page - http://www.example.com/subfolder/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 to it's subfolder http://www.example.com/subfolder/. Here's what I have: [ISAPI_Rewrite] Redirecting old article to new locations RewriteRule ^/subfolder/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 /subfolder/ [R=301,L] Can someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
Need advice on 301 domain redirection
Hello friends, We have two sites namely spiderman-example.com & avengers-example.com which sells the same product listed out under similar categories, since we are about to stop or put down the site “avengers-example.com” because we just want to concentrate in bringing up a single brand called spiderman-example.com. “Spiderman-example” has comparatively more visitors and conversion rates than ''avengers-example'' ie. 90 % more traffic and conversion. Avengers-example has a small fraction of loyal customers who still search for the brand-name & there are a hand-full of potential keywords those ranking on its own. So is it advisable to redirect Avengers-example to spiderman-example using 301-redirect? Will this help to gain any link-juice from Avengers-example? If so how can we effectively redirect between two domain’s with minimal loss in page authority & linkjuice to enhance ''spiderman-example''? Off beat:These names "Avengers" and "Spiderman" were just used as an example but the actual site names has no relation to the ones mentioned above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semvibe0 -
Redirecting Canonical 301s and Magento Website
I have an issue with a client's website where it has 3700+ pages, but roughly half of them are duplicates. Thankfully, the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL (I suppose this is Magento's way of making a printable page version of the same page. I don't know, I didn't build it.) My questions is, how can I get all the pages like this http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html?print to redirect to pages like this... http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html Also, do they NEED to be Canonical, or will a 301 redirect be sufficient. Also, after having done this, if anybody knows, is there a way I can turn that feature off in Magento, because we're expanding our product line, and I don't want to have to keep chasing after these "?print" pages after the fact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClifThompson0 -
Any Case Study of Reversion of Canonicalization?
Hi, Understand that if a Page A is being canonicalized to Page B, most probably Page B's ranking will increase (given their content and structure are all the same). But when the canonical tags are removed from Page B, Page A's rankings and traffic may recover to the original before it was canonicalized. The theories seem very true but does anyone have any case studies or direct experiences which proves these theories? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0