Capital Letters in URL

I have a new site that just went live a couple of weeks ago. My URLs contain both upper and lower case characters, e.g. http://www.tripcents.com/hotels/US/IL/Illinois/Chicago.html, however, a friend suggested that I make the URLs all lowercase before I get many links coming to the site. However, I'm not sure what benefit this would have. I thought that proper case would be easier for the users to read. And, if you type the URL in all lowercase it does find the correct page.

 

Well, if you want the ppl to be able to type the url, or to keep the url in mind, I'd say put it all lowercase. But if you just want it to look nice, and don't really care about the rest, keep it like this.

 

I do not quite understand, Could you elaborate? I can keep the url in mind better in Proper case.( Nouns & Abreviations Capitalized) rather than lower case. And I can type it either way. I really am not sure that it matters though. I am looking forward to more responses to this thread.

 

My friends comments were more from a standpoint of Google seeing both the lower case URL and proper case URL as two distinct pages and penalizing me for duplicate content. If everything was lowercase then the chances of a visitor typing it differently (i.e. not capitalizing a particular word like 'chicago') would be less likely. I just didn't know if I should worry about this or not.

 

Well, I keep url's better in mind in lowercase, then just trying out what to put lower, and what to put uppercase. Thats what I mean.

 

Whatever your urls. don't change once if you submitted in couple of sites. Because google treats www.abc.com and www.Abc.com both as a different urls. It is best practice to lower case the letters in urls.

 

My site has only been up for about 3 weeks. I can see that it has been spidered but I'm not sure if Google has or not. I haven't submitted a site map to Google yet. Do you think its too late to change the URLs to lowercase?

 

if in the file name (ex : /hotels/US/IL/Illinois/Chicago.html) you have capital letters , the only problem i see depend of the server you are on .

if you have a windows server this shouldn't be a problem because windows dont make difference between capital letters and lowercase letter .

but if your on Linux server based you will have a problem , it will show a 404 error page if they type : chicago.html instead of Chicago.html

So yes better to have all lowercase .

 

Thanks! I think I'll go ahead and make all my links lowercase. Since the site is relatively new there probably will never be a better time to do so.

 

I'd do the same, and I agree that you should do it now. Once you got a site a long time, and you added many more pages and directory's and such, it will take very very much work to change it all again.