Hey Jom, you only rewrite the URL if it is not all lowercase, you can distinguish between lower and upper-case in your rewrites.

Yeah, it is absolutely the right thing to do. You can force the URLs t be lower case in RoR as well if you don't want to do it in htaccess (i would do both).

You are simply saying:

• there are multiple versions of this page on different urls

• this is the main version of the page

301 them to lower case and canonicalise them and you are good to go!

Marcus

Hey Jom

Problem is, from a search engine perspective, those are four duplicate pages & from a linking perspective, they are four different pages that you could see your link popularity shared between. Neither of which is ideal.

I would certainly deal with this but it needn't be an arduous task.

1. Set up a rewrite rule to change all URLs to lowercase and 301 any non lowercase ones, something like this in your htaccess should do the job assuming you are using a LAMP environment.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap  lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

2. Add an automated lowercase canonical to all of these pages so they canonicalise to the lowercase version.

3. Try to replace the links so they all use lowercase. If this is a dynamic site it should be easy but if not, you could still do a string replacement across multiple files. You could write a little script to automate this if it is a huge job from the sitemap (of lowercase URLs of course.

Certainly worth doing and should not be too difficult with a bit of smarts applied.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

As ever with these things, I tend to think it depends on the client and budget. We can certainly do something better with WordPress but the costs are going to outstrip working with Shopify considerably. If the client has no technical staff and does not want to be responsible for the management of the store and just wants something that works and can be lightly SEO'd then, shopify is not terrible.

Sure, it's not great, but you have enough control to do the basics and if you want to get into the templating features it can be fairly powerful.

Also, unlike volusion and other similar packages, it includes a blog platform (very basic) that allows you to have a blog on the same domain instead of having to manage a separate blog.

Personally, I go WordPress + WooCommerce now if the budget supports it as you can really optimise that platform to perfection.

Is it a link or is it a canonical? If it is a link to the canonical then I would not imagine it is going to help anyway but personally, I would try to have high quality links and not these mass link bombs, it's just asking for trouble and you won't get 100,000 links worth of benefit anyway.

As ever, hard to be precise without seeing the site in question but... I would edge towards no follow here.

Hey Michelle

Just to clarify, are you saying that you have some sites with like a million pages and that these sites have a footer or template link to another site?

If so, this might be an interesting read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

I am not 100% clear here so as ever, examples would be useful but I really can't see that one domain putting a 1,000,000 inbound links to a single page on another domain as being anything but a bad, bad thing. Combine that with some dodgy anchor text and you are on the road to ruin.

It's a shot in the dark without an example but I would suggest an nofollow given what we know.