301 redirect from upper to lower case URL's

I have a horrible feeling I already know the answer to this but I'll ask anyway...

Is this possible? Can you 301 redirect from upper to lower case URL's on a Windows server?

I believe it's running on IIS.

 

never tried, but filenames are case-insensitive under windows, and I'd expect IIS to behave the same way.

 

SE's don't care about case sensitivity, so I would avoid this unless the file names themselves changed, because a 301 redirect is permanent and may be frowned upon by SE's. It's telling them the file locations have changed when they haven't. Your better off changing the upper case URLs to lower case on your site. The SE's will catch up and replace them in their index over time.

 

Confirm. IIS is caseinsensetive.

 

Thanks guys. I've gone with your recommendation, SearchBliss. All the URLs on the site are now lower case. I've submitted an updated sitemap to Google. Hopefully we won't suffer any duplicate content penalties and the new URL structure will filter through quickly enough.

 

Btw, I believe that IIS case-insensitivity is directly connected with case-insensitivity of Windows file systems (such as FAT32 and NTFS).

 

You won't have any "duplicate content penalties" so don't worry about it. SE's are much smarter today then ever...they know it is the same page, in the same location, with the same content. They don't see it as two. Good luck!

 

Just searching for some info on this and came across this thread...

An SEO company has recently reccommended that we do 301 redirects for any incoming URL that is not lowercase to a lowercase URL...

Were using IIS, and the site is setup on the file system with files which ARE all lowercase. But, being Windows/IIS, if a request comes in as domain.com/INDEX.HTML and the actual page is stored on the file system as index.html, it will render that page regardless leaving the browser URL case as-is.

My question, to do a 301 redirect to lowercase were going to have to check/redirect all incoming requests. Seems crazy to me, and a pointless waste of server resource (as well as breaking the RFC 301 standard?)

Could anyone offer any comments?

 

I'm sorry to contradict such a positive statement, but I've just been looking at logfiles for one of my IIS-using clients for August and I see GoogleBot has crawled the same file under two case variations, and has subsequently offered each path name to different searchers - the referrer clearly shows searches from Google, with both path names, and the IP addresses of the bots are Googles... and they have crawled both case variations recently. I have five more examples of that in this clients web server logs. Five of the case variations are from lax in-site usage and it looks as though one is derived from a blog mentioning a specific page on the site using the wrong case.

I have not yet observed a variation in page rank - I've only spotted this in the last few days and I have a lot of other work to do... but I can't imagine how a Search Engine could return results for what it clearly thinks are two different pages, *without* some variation of page rank.

Cheers, JeremyC.

 

In the absence of answers here, I've submitted my observations on IIS Case Folding to SEOMoz in a UGC article. It summarises several articles on my blog. I seem to have mostly LAMP users so I was hoping the ASPies here or at SEOmoz might know

Jeremiah Andrick (jandrick@twitter, FB) of Microsoft appears to be collecting information on the failings of IIS for SEO. I've had some brief correspondence with him about this, and the all-but-complete lack of information on Microsoft sites about IIS, ASP, case folding and SEO.

 

SearchBliss i mean no offence but SE's DO treat upper and lower case as different URL's.
Cant say for sure wheather you will get a dupe content penalty but i wouldnt risk it
I believe in it so much that im redirecting all upper and mixture case to lower case urls. Having said that does anyone know how to do it on IIS, shared Hosting, Non Linux so that means no htaccess. Im also not allowed to install 3rd party mods on this server says my hosting company