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.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      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

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      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. How do I know if I am correctly solving an uppercase url issue that may be affecting Googlebot?

    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.

    How do I know if I am correctly solving an uppercase url issue that may be affecting Googlebot?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    6
    1292
    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.
    • webrocket
      webrocket last edited by

      We have a large e-commerce site (10k+ SKUs). https://www.flagandbanner.com.

      As I have begun analyzing how to improve it I have discovered that we have thousands of urls that have uppercase characters. For instance: https://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/patriotic-paper-lanterns-string-lights.asp.

      This is inconsistently applied throughout the site. I directed our website vendor to fix the issue and they placed 301 redirects via a rule to the web.config file. Any url that contains an uppercase character now displays as a lowercase.

      However, as I use screaming frog to monitor our site, I see all these 301 redirects--thousands of them. The XML sitemap still shows the the uppercase versions. We have had indexing issues as well. So I'm wondering what is the most effective way to make sure that I'm not placing an extra burden on Googlebot when they index our site? Should I have just not cared about the uppercase issue and let it alone?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • LindsayE
        LindsayE Subscriber last edited by

        Not that I've noticed... I started with the company back in February and noticed it when I crawled the site with Screaming Frog. So they already had uppercase and lowercase permalinks back then. When I brought it to our developers attention they didn't seem to concerned. Then I saw something somewhere that discussed Google seeing them as potential duplicates. Which is when I posted to MOZ and got the response that it was fine since we have canonical URLs in place. So, it has not had any negative effect since I started that I can see. However, I don't know how to correct Screaming Frog from seeing as duplicate pages.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • webrocket
          webrocket @LindsayE last edited by

          Thanks for sharing this, Lindsay! Helpful. Have you seen any negative effects that stem from both uppercase and lowercase urls still being accessible?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • LindsayE
            LindsayE Subscriber last edited by

            I had the same issue in Screaming Frog and posted to Moz Q&A a few weeks ago about it that was resolved.

            https://moz.com/community/q/uppercase-lowercase-reading-as-duplicate-permalinks

            webrocket 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • webrocket
              webrocket @ThompsonPaul last edited by

              This is really helpful. Thank you!

              Mike

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

                It was still a good idea to create the redirects for the upper-case versions to help cut down duplicate content issues. Rel-canonical "could" have been used, but I find it's much better to actually redirect.

                But that means the lower-case URLs are the canonical URLs, so ONLY they should appear in the sitemap. (Sitemaps aren't supposed to contain any URLs that redirect.) Right now, you're giving the search crawlers contradictory directives, and they don't do well with those 🙂

                For additional cleanup, it would be good to have rules added to the CMS so that upper-case URL slugs cannot be created in the first place. Also run a check (can probably be done in the database) to ensure that any internal links on the site have been re-written NOT to use the uppercase URLs. there's no sense generating unnecessary redirects for URLs you control. (I suspect this is the majority of the cases that Screaming Frog is picking up.) You need to ensure all navigation and internal links are using the canonical lowercase version.

                The more directly the crawlers can access the final URL, the better your indexing will be. So don't have the sitemap sending them through redirects, and don't let your site's internal links do so either.

                Hope that helps?

                webrocket 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

                • HappyJackJr

                  Help with facet URLs in Magento

                  Hi Guys, Wondering if I can get some technical help here... We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout. These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process. Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19 Canonical to... http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html Which I understand to be incorrect. As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution? As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series. Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black ) But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior? My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls. Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter. Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr
                  0
                • CFSSEO

                  Double hyphen in URL - bad?

                  Instead of a URL such as domain.com/double-dash/  programming wants to use domain.com/double--dash/ for some reason that makes things easier for them. Would a double dash in the URL have a negative effect on the page ranking?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO
                  0
                • friendoffood

                  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.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
                  0
                • MasonBaker

                  Product or Shop in URL

                  What do you think is better for seo and for sale, I am using woo-ecommerce for health products website. websitename.com/product/keyword OR websitename.com/shop/keyword

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker
                  0
                • djlittman

                  If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?

                  I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org.  Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains.  I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman
                  0
                • underscorelive

                  What is the best URL structure for categories?

                  A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted.  However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive
                  0
                • 379seo

                  Canonical URLs and Sitemaps

                  We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names.  So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category.  And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345.  This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL?  In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345.  This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345.  Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo
                  0
                • CommercePundit

                  How to fix issues regarding URL parameters?

                  Today, I was reading help article for URL parameters by Google. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1235687 I come to know that, Google is giving value to URLs which ave parameters that change or determine the content of a page. There are too many pages in my website with similar value for Name, Price and Number of product. But, I have restricted all pages by Robots.txt with following syntax. URLs:
                  http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=name
                  http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=price
                  http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100 Syntax in Robots.txt
                  Disallow: /?dir=
                  Disallow: /?p=
                  Disallow: /*?limit= Now, I am confuse. Which is best solution to get maximum benefits in SEO?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
                  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.