Upper and lower case in URL's

Hi,

I am going to update my first site I designed, not knowing at the time, I had the url's with capitals like this:
www.mysite/Page_One.htm

Now I am redesigning it, would i be better to change them to all lower case like this page_one.htm ?

And if I do, would an inbound link pointing to Page_One still be pointing to page_one if I lose the capitals?

Thanks

 

It will not matter that you change the uppers to lowers as far as the serps go and they will probaly re-index anyways when you change it.

 

I am not convinced about this. How sure are you ?

 

Of course it will matter Page_One.htm and page_one.htm are two completely different urls. If you really need to change this you should 301 redirect Page_One.htm to the new page_one.htm in order not to lose backlinks and PR. And try using - instead of _.

 

Are you sure PubsIt? when i type in www.mysite.com/Page_One.htm it automatically opens page_one.htm as opposed to getting a 404 error. To me it appears that Google is seeing them as the same thing?

Infact if you click the construction software link in my sig and watch the url as the page opens, you will see that I have Construction_Software as the link, but it's opening construction_software it looks like it's OK, what do you think?

 

Capitals in subdirectories matter!

Capitalize any letter behind / in below link and it won't work.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070831/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq

But in your case both variants point to the Home Page.

Capitals in domains and subdomains don't matter though.

 

I think I'll be OK then as all pages are directly from the homepage, I didn't set up directories as I wasn't expecting there to be so many pages.

So as long as I keep these pages out of folders regardless of upper or lower case and do any new ones correctly in the folders I'll be OK?

 

I don't know why you would need to change capitalization anyway.

 

the Construction_Software in your signature is already 301 redirected to construction_software which is ok and google is seeing the same thing for both urls. here is the header response

i also am curious why do you want to change this.

 

Well that's a bit weird! I didn't set that up, is it possible my host has done that for me?

The only reason for changing the case is to try and get it all a bit more standard.

So is the text at the bottom of that web-sniffer page is a standard redirect? So for example if I wanted to actually change a page title for optimisation purposes I would just keep the original pages with nothing but that code pointing to the right pages?

 

Actually it gets weirder.

I checked Construction_Software.html and construction_software.html and they are also 301 redirected to the .htm version.

Check the .htaccess file.

And this page here is done the other way around. The version with small letters goes to caps version and the .htm goes to .html

 

i suggest you to use redirect from upper case url to lower case urls.

because sitename.com/page.html and sitename.com/PAGE.html are different urls

 

Well it doesn't matter if its uppercase or lowercase because google can parse actual words so if were rating for "Page Video" you will still rank for "page video".

Just choose whichever is easy to manage.

 

I am not sure but lower case url is better.

 

That COULD be explained by the shopping cart software which I've used to create that page, it's supposed to be a good SEO package, apparently it does automatically redirect a page if I remove it from the site.

As for the rest, I have no idea what's going on, but it seems I don't need to worry about it.

Thanks all.

 

hope this a bit techie explanation helps it.

Most hosting use Unix or Linux as the main OS. In that world the Page.htm, page.htm, PAGE.htm are all 3 different files. If Google use Unix (don't know their OS though), Google will handle all of them as separate files. Windows server will handle them as one file (which you can't have 3 of them at the same place).

For SERPS point of view, I do think that Google has the ability to read all variations. No problem with reading and indexing, the problem will arise if you have 3 of them altogether and Google index them as 3 different files. That leads to content duplication.

Some host (mostly new servers) has set automatic Apache (or htaccess) redirect from those capitalized words to the none capitalized ones (generally, but not the vice versa). So even if you type Page.htm it will redirect to page.htm but still maintaining the Page.htm in the browser's address bar (it's htaccess redirect).

Most of you may use index.php as the home page and have no index.htm or index.html in the main directory and it works with no problem. Technically speaking index.php is set with the Apache redirect (not the htaccess redirect), so the problem with capitalization is quite the same with this problem. Which version to redirect (.htm to .html or .html to .htm) is up to the hosting company and most of the time they will hesitantly change it even if you request it from them.

What you need to do is to set your own redirect with htaccess. Although I think it's quite strange that you set double redirect. And it may also slow down the loading process which may annoys some visitors. So, stick it with your hosting recommendation except you are using 3rd party script like shopping cart or such which is quite hard to change.

Domain and subdomain names are also automatically redirected. So you won't have DigitalPoint.com along with digitalpoint.com.

With that said, imo, here's are the conclusion:
- SEO based, capitalized or not is not a problem. Problem will come up if you have all kind of versions altogether.
- Visitor based, lower case is the best. Why? Becoz people are "lazy" or may just forget which part is capitalized. And if your hosting company doesn't support auto redirect (if you change a company or the server has a problem) like those older server, you are in trouble.
- All upper case is also considered "screaming". So don't use that in your file name even though it may stand out in the search results.
- Whether you will lose the backlinks or not, only Google can answer that. Go ask them and please update us with the answer.
- I would play safe and use all lower case. Then set a 301 redirect from the capitalized to the lower case one. Wait for some time until it has the same link juice then erase the capitalized one.

That's it. Hope it helps. Quite a long post for the quick reply box