Google Recognizes Same URL twice

depends on capitalization

[jonrichd]

I recently acquired a site where the previous webmaster used uppercase and lowercase letters for individual pages (like WidgetPage.htm). The site is hosted on IIS, where capitalization means nothing when retrieving URLs.

Looking at the pages indexed, I noticed that Google now has the same page indexed more than once, one with the InitialCaps version, and another with the initialcaps version. Blame it on me, for creating an updated look and feel without worrying about capitalization.

Not wanting to get hit with a duplicate content penalty, I'm wondering whose fault this is. From the standpoint of my site and server, there is no difference in how I refer to the site's pages. Should I have to go check every link to make sure I don't refer to it in multiple spellings, or is this something that Google should pick up on its own?

[a_chameleon]

Indexed, as in Google's cache for your site?

[jonrichd]

The same page appears twice in the listings. One cache shows the 'old' page layout, the other shows the 'new' page layout.

This morning I went ahead and updated the links so that all now have the same capitalization. Still, it seems odd that this would happen.

[Stefan]

Not wanting to get hit with a duplicate content penalty

You won't. I made the same mistake, ignoring caps because of a Windows server, then changed almost everything to lowercase prior to a move to Unix, (which never happened in the end). This was about 7 months ago. Google still has both versions, /page.htm and /Page.htm, but now only crawls /page, and only shows that one in the serps because all the internal linking was changed to /page. If you add the &filter=0 to the end of the search URL you can find the others, (or did last time I looked... might have changed by now), but it never affected my serps at all. All the #1 pages, before I messed things up, were still #1 over the last 7 months.