upper and lower case in URLs

[gemini]

Well, I figured I made mistake long time ago when I chose to use first capital letters of the category names in my URLs (that was like 2 years ago). Now I see that Google and Yahoo has some of my pages in low case and those pages have no or very little pagerank. What bothers me the most - if duplicate content issue reflects upon those pages? It is also a paint in the butt to find our who linked to me this way and make them change the urls, what would be the correct way of fixing this nonsense?

Should I use 301 redirect or just disallow indexing of the low case urls in my robots.txt?

Thanks for suggestions.

[sufyaaan]

Well, I figured I made mistake long time ago when I chose to use first capital letters of the category names in my URLs (that was like 2 years ago). Now I see that Google and Yahoo has some of my pages in low case and those pages have no or very little pagerank. What bothers me the most - if duplicate content issue reflects upon those pages? It is also a paint in the butt to find our who linked to me this way and make them change the urls, what would be the correct way of fixing this nonsense?

Should I use 301 redirect or just disallow indexing of the low case urls in my robots.txt?

Thanks for suggestions.
First of all, it doesn't matter for any SEs whether you are using lower or upper case in your URLs. There is no correlation with the case of your URLs to their PageRank. So, IMHO, your best bet is to leave them as it is.

[Bruno]

Im sure i have read on this site that Msn is little case sensitive:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002744.html

[sufyaaan]

Im sure i have read on this site that Msn is little case sensitive:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002744.html
Bruno - Have you actually checked it yourself? I think the WMW thread discussed at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002744.html is almost 2 months old. :D

Now you should run these queries and see for yourself:

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=blue+widgets

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=Blue+Widgets

[gemini]

First of all, it doesn't matter for any SEs whether you are using lower or upper case in your URLs. There is no correlation with the case of your URLs to their PageRank. So, IMHO, your best bet is to leave them as it is.

Why then the toolbar shows different PageRank for the same url indexed twice with upper and lower case in it? And it (Google) shows different cache dates and time for each indexed page. Yahoo even shows different cache for each page since the cache time difference is pretty big.

[Bruno]

Bruno - Have you actually checked it yourself?
No, i did not :)

[gemini]

any more ideas?

[pk_synths]

First of all, it doesn't matter for any SEs whether you are using lower or upper case in your URLs.

No but it matters to the server if it's case sensative. That issue can cause many many 401s. Speaking from experience of course.

Gemini is your server case sensative? Does the page load correctly if you use both URLs?

[gemini]

Gemini is your server case sensative? Does the page load correctly if you use both URLs?

Yes, the pages load correctly, but as I mentioned before, if you link to them in different cases - they are being treated as different pages by Google and Yahoo (haven't checked the MSN) and have their own cache too.

[SEOJaimie]

Having 2 pages with 2 different capitalizations AFAIK results in 2 seperate listings in the SERPs.

I would hope with Google's recent attempt to normalize www. vs. no www and such would also address these problems as well, but the solution, I would say, for now ...

Take the one that ranks better, make SURE internally you're consistent, and 301 the rest to the normalized URL.

I've been doing this for awhile in my applications. I have functions that generate URLs, and if they're changed, or wrong, it automatically 301s it based on id. Example ... here's a site I designed on Vioxx lawyer stuff:

http://www.lawyerseek.com/Practice/Pharmaceutical-Injury-C1/Vioxx-P57/

There's a difference here between VIOXX and Vioxx to SE's, though I would hope they'd try to normalize it.

These happen to be mod_rewrites, but the same concepts apply.

now try ...

http://www.lawyerseek.com/Practice/Pharmaceutical-Injury-C1/VIOXX-P57/

Of course, if you're dealing with pages that are physical files on anything other than Microsoft servers, this problem is moot.

I suspect that URL parameters would also result in 2 serps ...

?ID=1

vs.

id=1

food for thought ...

J.