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Mark,

In the canonicalization guide link you sent me, there is a link to Matt Cutts' blog www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ where he talks about it.  In that blog he posts:

Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

This makes me think that doing a 301 redirect and a rel="canonical" for lower case is not needed.

I'm conflicted again.

When you rewrite a URL that is already lower case  to lower case with a 301 response code, does it now return a 301?  Does that mean all pages on the site now return 301? Wouldn't that be bad?

Sorry if I'm being dense.  I understand enough about rewrite rules to be dangerous (sometimes, very dangerous).

Jom

Thanks, much!  I will read through these.

Hi Marcus and Mark,

Thanks for the response.  On creating the rel="canonical" statements.

That means that I will have thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (there are a lot of cities and zips in the US) of rel="canonical" statements on my site.

I thought I read on one of the blogs that too many canonical statements are bad practice.  The site is dynamic (Ruby on Rails), I can certainly make the change.  I would just like to be sure it's the wise thing to do.

I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content.  The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input.

A couple examples are:

www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale

www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale

www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent

www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent

There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site.

Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?