Case sensitive / insensitive

Google indexes both -> doublicate content!

[Yidaki]

i'm a bit shocked since i just noticed that google indexes and lists some of my pages in lowercase AND uppercase - now i'm really afraid that google sees them as doublicate content.

example keyword returns:
position 5: "mydomain.com/My-Site/The-Page.htm"
AND
position 12: "mydomain.com/my-site/the-page.htm"

Both types work since i'm running my server on a mac and it doesn't make any difference if i use case sensitive or insensitive urls. But this is definitely doublicate content - i don't want to be listed twice!

I can't tell all people that link to me that they only use MixEdOrnoTMixed case ...

Any suggestions?

[bharatgautam]

Please advise me I am Bharat Gautam from NAHAN and I want to know how do this act.
Like I have registered my site as <snip>

So how does google search for this
Do they need all the keyword like <word1 word2 word3>
Or individual like <word1word2word3>

Please advise.

[edited by: ciml at 10:13 am (utc) on Sep. 25, 2002]
[edit reason] Generalised. [/edit]

[Yidaki]

You misunderstood. Google doesn't return different results if you search for "THISWORD" or "thisword". But what is true is that google indexes some (of my) urls with capitals and without capitals and shows them as different results for the same search.

Since this is really important - google may one day penalize those pages because of the "unwanted duplicate content" - i would like to hear something either from brett or googleguy or any tech person at google.

I think this is a serious google bug! Google should compare dublicate urls without comparing lowercase/uppercase and only list one of them!

... and welcome to WebmasterWorld, bharatgautam!

[ciml]

Yidaki, domains are not case sensitive but URLs are.

example.com/whatever is the same as EXAMPLE.com/whatever

example.com/whatever is not the same as example.com/WHATEVER

Ideally, Google will see them as identical and merge them. If you change the content between the times that the URLs are fetched, or if you have part of the page that changes often (eg. a random part), then Google will index them separately.

If possible, I suggest changing all of the links to each page to point to the same address.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, bharatgautam.
(I recommend paynt's welcome post [webmasterworld.com])

Google treats word1 word2 word3 differently from word1word2word3. If you use both in your page then people will find you more easily.

[Yidaki]

ciml, thanks for the info!

"Ideally, Google will see them as identical and merge them."

So, do you think or know if i then won't get penalized if google doesn't merge them?

"If you change the content between the times that the URLs are fetched, or if you have part of the page that changes often (eg. a random part), then Google will index them separately."

That makes sense since i frequently change parts of each page every time the page is loaded - news, ads and such.

"If possible, I suggest changing all of the links to each page to point to the same address."

hmm, they all point to the same page - but the page can be different today than yesterday - like written above. but i can't avoid that people either link to /My_Page.htm or /my_page.htm ...

Should i think about writing a case sensitivity check and a 404 or 301 routine if the URL doesn't match the one in my database?

[ciml]

> ...penalized if google doesn't merge them?

I wouldn't like to predict that. I haven't seen evidence, but your multiple listings generally will not be as good as one listing with both sets of links (which is what happens when they're merged).

> ...case sensitivity check...

Sounds good to me. I'd use a 301 redirect, you might get the links merged.

[Yidaki]

ciml, yes i'll set up such a check and the 301 redirects ...

however, like it looks know, google just merged my "dublicate urls" to one - great!