URL Variable Case, Does it matter?

[nick420]

We run our sites using primarily Apache webserver. We recently changed our variable names to remove the word ID out of them. During the process some variable names lost consistency in case. Example:

www.myurl.com/SOMEVAR=1
www.myurl.com/SomeVar=1
www.myurl.com/somevar=1

Now in google we have duplicate content on some of these pages, where it will show up the same page but different cases of the variable names like show above. My question is will google merge these records or treat them as seperate documents. If so, should I expect heavy penalties for dup content?

-Nick

[gypsychild]

As far as I know, Google doesn't distinguish between lower and upper case, so think these pages would most likely be treated as one.

[g1smd]

I would try to sort it out so that all have lower case.

It will take a month or two for the changes to stick, but may well be worth doing.

Other search engines might not be so happy with the variable case URLs.