ASP Canonical and Internal Linking

[LA_Steve]

Hello -

I'm working with a large ASP website and trying to troubleshoot issues I believe might be related to how the canonical element is used.

On page - all internal links, including navigation links, use the following format (uppercase) - website.com**/F**older/Folder/Product . So, any page navigated to will always display the uppercase version of the URL. And, all of these pages have the canonical tag pointing to the lowercase version of the URL.

The pages included in Google's index are all lowercase versions of the URL like this - website.com**/f**older/folder/product .

My concern is that a lot of internal authority flow is being impacted/negated because all internal links point to the uppercase versions of URLs and all those pages reference the lowercase version URL in the canonical reference.

Is this a valid concern?

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Steve,

The problem with case sensitive URLs is that while most of ASP.net servers (based on MS technology) treat them as one URL referring to the same page; on the other hand Google for Indexing purpose treats case-sensitive URLs as different ones. I would recommend implementing a solution to convert all URLs to lower case, something like mentioned here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/878578/how-can-i-have-lowercase-routes-in-asp-net-mvc

I hope this helps, let me know if you have further queries.

Regards,

Vijay

[Seenlyst]

Hey Steve,

It doesn't matter if you chose to use uppercase or lowercase (though I personally prefer to use lowercase because it's easier to manage), but it's important to be consistent with one option and make sure your website is redirecting one to another correctly. If not you might run into the duplicate content issue.

As for your website you should make sure the canonical URL are consistent with the one you chose as well, so in this case if you're going with uppercase then you should have your canonical URL set to uppercase as well.

Hope this answered your question.

Regards,
Joseph Yap