my site uses capitalized URLS as below: http://www.ieltsanswers.com/IELTS-Books.html From what I have read URL should be all in lowercase...now I know but my site uses lots of uppercase, and I have used these urls in eBooks and online places. I guess my questions are: 1. how damaging is this? 2. does it hurt my SEO? 3. best option to fix it? [STEP 1: I could make a whole bunch of new pages and then do redirects; STEP 2: I could leave those old pages there and then create the new pages with similar but not duplicate content and use those new pages on my menu...essentially with the old pages going into the shadows] It would be great news if it doesn't matter and i can just leave things the way they are...but I suspect down the line I will 1. run into problems 2. have more work to fix it because I will have many more pages I am a teacher and write eBooks and then if I get time I work on my website. Time is always an issue!
While it is bad practise to use capitalisations in your urls as you have, it may not be as detrimental as you think it could be. There is a possibility for duplicate code if some search engines are able to access the same pages with the lowercase equivalent. But I think this depends on how your server serves the pages from their requests. Fortunately you can use 301 redirects in your .htaccess file to redirect both users and search bots from one url to another. It would involve recreating the pages with the corrections and linking the old url addresses to the new via rules written in your .htaccess file. You may like to read the following: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection Doing this can prevent the damage done to your ranking and indexing by moving content around your site or duplicating it. Whether this is the best solution for your problem, I am not sure. There are more capable and knowledgeable members of this forum than myself who hopefully can present a better method.
I don't know if google would punish you for having capital letters in your domains, but think about people trying to find your pages. Almost every website is all lowercase, I don't think i've ever typed a capital letter in the url bar. If i was trying to find your site I'd probably type all lowercase and get a 404. I'd redirect the current pages and make it a point not to use capitals any longer.
http://html-css.happycodings.com/span-tag-text-transform-uppercase-lowercase-capitalize.html Span tag text-transform uppercase lowercase capitalize <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xml:lang='en'> <head> <title>Span Tag Text Transform Uppercase Lowercase Capitalize</title> <style type='text/css'> body { font: 20px arial; } p { padding: 5px 20px; background: orange; border: 1px solid green; } span.lower { text-transform: lowercase; } span.upper { text-transform: uppercase; } span.capitalize { text-transform: capitalize; } span.example { background: red; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Love Sayings Love Quotes Love Proverbs</h1> <p> <span class='lower example'>A SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE REQUIRES FALLING IN LOVE MANY TIMES, ALWAYS WITH THE SAME PERSON. MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN </span> <span class='upper example'> love asks me no questions, and gives me endless support... william shakespeare </span> <span class='capitalize example'> the heart has reasons that reason does not understand. jacques benigne bossuel</span> </p> </body> </html> HTML:
Try adding this to your .htaccess: <IfModule mod_speling.c> CheckSpelling On CheckCaseOnly On </IfModule> Code (markup): That will turn on apache spellchecking, but then limit it to checking for case sensitivity only. So the page will get delivered as long as is is spelled correctly without regard to case. It requires that the host has mod_speling.c installed.
The main URL is in small case so i don't think so it will impact the SEO. However in most of the cases the capital letter URls are automatically redirected to the small ones.
While most SEOs will recommend sticking to only one version, I recommend to always choose lowercase pattern (just because there will always be people who will link to a more traditional, plain-text version If for some reason you start seeing URLs with capital letters get into index (someone linked to it or you changed your content management system and it capitalized some URLs), use 301-redirect to let people, search crawlers and links go to non-capitalized URLs to avoid any problems. www.whereinus.com