To respond, I don't think it was an EMD or PMD (partial matching domain) issue as the domain is not relative to any keywords, industry, etc.

If the 301s are removed from these uppercase urls and sites link to them, would the canonical do enough to inform the crawlers to pick up the lowercase version where the canonical tag points to?

Would this cause link juice to be split between the uppercase urls and lowercase urls, or would the canonical take care of that? Note: there are plenty of links going to the uppercase urls because they were in existence for several years.

Thanks for the other suggestions.

We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget).

A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url.

I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site.

We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.

Hi. I was curious to know if you were able to find all the urls that needed to be removed, if they were effectively removed, and if your traffic came back. I'm assuming you were dealing with Panda issues.