Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Isn't Google smart enough 2 see it's the exact same URL?
Also will this count against me as duplicate content? That is my main concern.
If it makes a difference my hobby site is hosted by geocities.
Hmmmm... maybe it means Google finally realizes my 7 yrs of service and is recognizing me as being 2x's as important as normal because of recent major content upgrades.
Closest I found 2 this topic was about www -www but this seems slightly different. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
To make it longer, a different case could lead to a different page depending on the server - that's why they are considered as different.
What kind of server is your site hosted on?
Or would this create a loop?
You can use a rewritemap to do it on an Apache server.
On an Apache setup I wouldn't be bothered, let the wrong ones 404 out. Just make certain you are actually sending a 404 (after what Matt Cutts said on his blog, I'm not so sure that Google knows how to handle them).
On an IIs setup all it does is allow others to create duplicate content all over the place on your site. So here I'd do some cleanup. But since I'm in a Windows free zone I can't really help.
This tripped some kind of duplicate content filter as a search on Google revealed that all three were present in their index as separate pages.
Shortly after we found out, as you would have expected, we dropped from the SERPs like a brick.
We've spent the last two months 301'ing all pages with a capital letter in the URL to a lower case URL, and it was a very expensive mistake.
Some advice from someone who's been through this problem (and now beginning to see the light again) is to check, check and check again that ALL links throughout your site are lower case, especially if you're running a Windows server with IIS.
Yahoo and MSN never had a problem recognising each URL as the same page, but as we relied on Google for much of our traffic, we lost a lot of income.
Better safe, than sorry.
What kind of server is your site hosted on?
Site is hosted by Yahoo/Geocities .... I don't have any real control... except to pay them $5 / month to keep the site free of ads.
I hope that I escape any duplicate content penalty. This is the first time in 7 yrs I have seen this and thankfully it is only on 1 page.
I guess anyone could link to someone elses pages with different cases to cause this same problem. Maybe I can get those 3 backlinks to change the URL or beg yahoo to throw me a bone.
I know it's the big leagues in here but I take pride in the info I provide & I can't afford real hosting or domain and losing all my backlinks would be a real bummer.
I can't afford real hosting
Good grief - look around...
Here in the UK I've got a massive site up on a real host for about £40 a year - $60.
It comes with so much more control and so many more facilities.
£40 is worth it for the extra kudos and traffic it's brought me...
Our local newspaper, by the way, offers a lesser package at £280 a year...
DerekH
Get some real hosting, on Apache, where if a filename has all lowercase letters, any other attemped access results in a 404 error.
If you really want to catch visitors using the wrong case, and serve content to them, then a simple line of code in the .htaccess file to redirect all wrong case accesses to the right case (with a search-engine safe "301 redirect") is what you will want to be doing.
Both Xenu LinkSleuth and WebBug are great tools that can help.
