Hi,
simply by using a canonical tag in the beginning you would have not had to 301 redirect all of your links. Your internal linking structure can become a real issue if you have a lot of 301s creating redirect chains. There are so many variables in this that I honestly want to know more and why you made this change because you said this was before the rollout of Panda so were you doing anything that you thought would be bad?
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Having a canonical tag with capital letters in the URL
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as well as the canonical tag tells Google this is not duplicate content this is one URL.
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http://example.com/Blue-Widget
or
- http://example.com/Blue-Widget
I would be happy to do a brief audit on your website and give you the information using deep crawl this would allow me to give you a much more educated answer as to what you can do to fix this issue. However 301 redirecting that many links is not good when you can use a canonical tag. Simply send me a private message if you're uncomfortable posting the URL in the form.
Obviously anyone building a new website do not use capital letters in your URLs. However there are so many variations that the canonical tag tells Google this is the right URL rather it has capital letters in it or not.
Yes it is true that if you're using a Linux server especially having capital letters in your URLs is not preferred when building a site. However for you too 301 redirect all of your URLs or 50% because they are capitalized is way too much.
The canonical tag would have sufficed take care of the issue in an ideal situation obviously you would not create any links that have capital letters in them at all.
Would have been the ideal way of keeping your URLs simply because they have capitals in them does not make them terrible if Google knows which one is supposed to be the correct one.
http://example.com/Blue-Widget
Verse
301 to http://example.com/blue-widget
When Google crawls a website it is going to want the canonical so if you're old links had been written as
I don't know enough about the situation prior however when you think about it how many times can Google pick a different URL if it's in your's XML site map as well as your HTML site map?
the same thing occurs with
Google considers you must choose the correct URL and stick with it "Awesome links don't change".
in this case you can use it 301 redirect but you see the variances in all sorts of links this is corrected by picking the one you want and staying with it. If it's the original link I suggest you stick with that.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development#4e
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
I hope this was of help to you,
Thomas
PS an example of what I was speaking about is right here. The domain name http://www.ras-tech.com CDN is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
I just had a CDN url created it the reason that this is relevant is the CDN has the option to put a canonical tag pointing to the origin server which is www.ras-tech.com but the URL for the CDN currently is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
Go to the waterfall section and you can see that it took this tool to ras-tech.com
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/kNiPW/http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
you can like at the site code and tell there is no CDN routed/ redirected through the site so this URL will take you to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ this URL http://www.ras-tech.com unless I told it to go to another one using just the canonical.
try going to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ and I guarantee it takes you to the origin.
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