Upper and Lowercase URL links - make a differnece in seo?

Hello everyone,

Had a quick question regarding links to a website (to the same web page), one is, for example "example DOT com/fileextension.php" and one is "example DOT com/FileExtension.php" (note the capitalization in the file extension in the URL).

Does anyone know if this is bad seo practice or if they are viewed as the same web page in Google's eyes?

Thanks!

 

The filename should always be in lower cases. and there should not be spaces between words. thats the best practise standard both from programming point of view as well as seo..

 

Well said....

 

Okay, that was my initial though.

Do you know if it is viewed as the same page to Google and other search engines? I know that servers can be configured to make sites with the "www" and without the www be two different sites/web pages and sometimes confuses google. Know if this is similar with the capitalizations or no?

By the way, thanks for the replies.

 

both these pages would be treated as duplicated pages by Google so you must redirect one type to other. General & preferred practice is to have lowercase letters in your URL.

 

Are you sure about it ?

 

As far as I know Google treats the upper case same as the lower case.

 

Yes. I agree. Uppercase and lowercase are just the same. If you accidentally typed in your URL in uppercase, still your URL is the lowercase version of it. There is no difference.

 

Yep, It doesn't make a difference

 

Uppercase and lowercase are the same to Google, but not to humans. If you type, adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal, you get "URL error", but if you type, adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, you get the right page and it's annoying to type KeywordToolExternal, with K ,T and E uppercase.

 

I've never heard of it actually being treated differently. I think that if you were to include an underscore in between the two words, that may make a difference, but not just the capitalization. However, I do agree that it is standard to use lowercase lettering.

 

There's no difference.

 

I don't know about others, but I have got this duplicacy issue on my site itself. In the webmaster tool both the pages were reported as having duplicate meta tags. I think this could create an issue in future. Also check this thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=3dffa9ce33298321&hl=en

 

according to me and google both are different. check your google webmaster account for more details

 

I actually found this same issue. When I raised the question above i was doing re-visions to one of my sites. I have since been able to change all the urls to lowercase but when i did have some links with upper case lettering they are now showing up as duplicate pages in webmaster tools. This may be similar to having the "www" and not having it since depending on the way your server is configured you can have pages rendered in some crazy ways.

 

You should always use lower cases. Google thinks that name.com/name, name.com/Name and name.com/naME are different URL. I have a site on ASP.Net on windows server which does not make find any difference cases and in webmaster tool I see a lot of duplicate pages.

 

As a few other people have said, they'll come up as duplicates in webmaster tools. Won't make a difference from the user perspective but they do for google.

Pick a case and stick with it. It might not make much of a difference but if you're really trying to get an edge on SEO, why risk it?