Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Case Sensitive URLs, Duplicate Content & Link Rel Canonical

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Case Sensitive URLs, Duplicate Content & Link Rel Canonical

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    4
    3844
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • allianzireland
      allianzireland last edited by

      I have a site where URLs are case sensitive. In some cases the lowercase URL is being indexed and in others the mixed case URL is being indexed. This is leading to duplicate content issues on the site.

      The site is using link rel canonical to specify a preferred URL in some cases however there is no consistency whether the URLs are lowercase or mixed case. On some pages the link rel canonical tag points to the lowercase URL, on others it points to the mixed case URL.

      Ideally I'd like to update all link rel canonical tags and internal links throughout the site to use the lowercase URL however I'm apprehensive!

      My question is as follows:

      If I where to specify the lowercase URL across the site in addition to updating internal links to use lowercase URLs, could this have a negative impact where the mixed case URL is the one currently indexed?

      Hope this makes sense!

      Dave

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • allianzireland
        allianzireland last edited by

        Thanks Hutch and Ryan, great answers and exactly what I need. Appreciate it!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • RyanPurkey
          RyanPurkey last edited by

          In addition to using rel=canonical for the lowercase version of your URLs you should also consider implementing redirection from uppercase to lowercase.  A regex expert should be able to write the redirect script you'll need to add to your .htaccess file in order to change upper to lowercase. Cheers!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Hutch42
            Hutch42 last edited by

            While you might see a small down tick in the beginning as Google indexes and updates, overall you should not suffer any long term negative effects from standardizing your URI structure.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • Steven_Macdonald

              Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: 301 redirect or keep both & rel canonical?

              Hey Mozzers, I'll be moving several sites from HTTP to HTTPS in the coming weeks (same brand, multiple ccTLDs). We'll start on a low traffic site and test it for 2-4 weeks to see the impact before rolling out across all 8 sites. Ideally, I'd like to simply 301 redirect the HTTP version page to the HTTPS version of the page (to get that potential SEO rankings boost). However, I'm concerned about the potential drop in rankings, links and traffic. I'm thinking of alternative ways and so instead of the 301 redirect approach, I would keep both sites live and accessible, and then add rel canonical on the HTTPS pages to point towards HTTP so that Google keeps the current pages/ links/ indexed as they are today (in this case, HTTPS is more UX than for SEO). Has anyone tried the rel canonical approach, and if so, what were the results? Do you recommend it? Also, for those who have implemented HTTPS, how long did it take for Google to index those pages over the older HTTP pages?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven_Macdonald
              0
            • ajiabs

              Duplicate content due to parked domains

              I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names.  So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs
              0
            • MBASydney

              Duplicate content on sites from different countries

              Hi, we have a client who currently has a lot of duplicate content with their UK and US website. Both websites are geographically targeted (via google webmaster tools) to their specific location and have the appropriate local domain extension. Is having duplicate content a major issue, since they are in two different countries and geographic regions of the world? Any statement from Google about this? Regards, Bill

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney
              0
            • Bio-RadAbs

              Meta tags - are they case sensitive?

              I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description. It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages,  I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following: name="Description" content=" I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as: name="description" content=" Thoughts?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
              0
            • BobGW

              PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content

              Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW
              0
            • mj775

              Canonical VS Rel=Next & Rel=Prev for Paginated Pages

              I run an ecommerce site that paginates product pages within Categories/Sub-Categories. Currently, products are not displayed in multiple categories but this will most likely happen as time goes on (in Clearance and Manufacturer Categories). I am unclear as to the proper implementation of Canonical tags and Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages. I do not have a View All page to use as the Canonical URL so that is not an option. I want to avoid duplicate content issues down the road when products are displayed in multiple categories of the site and have Search Engines index paginated pages. My question is, should I use the Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages as well as using Page One as the Canonical URL? Also, should I implement the Canonical tag on pages that are not yet paginated (only one page)?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj775
              0
            • 360eight-SEO

              News sites & Duplicate content

              Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
              Chris Captivate

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
              0
            • Jellyfish-Agency

              Rel=canonical tag on original page?

              Afternoon All,
              We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.