Upper/Lower Case Folder Names

In Windows Server they're the same, but not in Google.

[lnternet]

Using windows servers you can access your folders using either upper or lower case letter as the windows server system associates upper and lower case letter to folder names.

Google Page Rank system doesn’t share this advanced technology and to the best of my knowledge nor does its search counterpart.

This causes Page Rank errors on certain pages but even more of a problem is if the search side of Google also sees this as a separate page.

Example:

[webmasterworld.com...] Page Rank 0

[webmasterworld.com...] Page Rank 6

This glitch can be manipulated by webmasters to easily create new pages on there websites and this will generate more Page Rank which "could" help their search listings.

This reminds me of when Google still gave Page Rank for variable driven ASP pages such as [webmasterworld.com...] would be given a Page Rank and allowed to cast Page Rank to other pages.

Is this something that Google will correct in future versions of its Page Rank software or is it just not an issue?

What’s your option?

[ciml]

Hello Internet, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

HTTP is case sensitive, so even though some Web servers and some CGI software is case insensitive it would be wrong for Google to assume that /Foo is the same as /foo

I think people get confused because they've only known Windows, and haven't worked with case sensitive filesystems or CGI interractions. Also, domain names are case insensitive, so www.Example.com is the same as www.example.com

Having a page called /Foo and a page called /foo doesn't give any more or less advantage than having a page called /foo1 and a page called /foo2 (unless Google change their behaviour some day and start wrongly to combine URLs differing only in case).

The PR 'guess' that the Toolbar servers used to use for unindexed pages did not allow Google to cast Page Rank to other pages.

That wasn't actual PR, and even if it was it couldn't have been given to other pages - if a page hadn't been indexed then Google couldn't have seen any links from it.

[kaled]

Most people (like myself) that are used to case-insensitive file systems consider case-sensitivity to be mind-numbingly stupid. In practice, it is restrictive because most people, fearful of making a stupid mistake, stick entirely to lower case file names.

However, we're stuck with the system, stupid though it may be.

That said, Google ought to to be able to detect Windows servers from the http headers and switch off case-sensitivity.

Kaled.