Mixed Case URLs

[kmayer]

Greetings,

I have a site using IIS that has some pages named in mixed case like this “StartHere.aspx”. We have since adopted a practice of just using lower case moving forward (mostly to avoid the possibility that Google would think we also had a page called starthere.aspx with identical content). is there any reason we should go back and convert those old mixed case file names to lower case?

[tedster]

I'd say no. Changing established URLs can be labor intensive, requires lots of 301 redirects, and causes loss of ranking power for at least a period of time. The potential gain "some time in the future" is not worth going through the downside.

What you could do is survey your backlinks and see if there are any that point to a different mixture of cases or all lower case. THOSE urls might be worth changing on a case-by-case basis. Also watch your 404 responses.

I assume you're on a Windows IIS server, so the server should adapt to any mixture of cases as long as the spelling itself is correct. But as you know, search engines can mix up the backlink credit. So if it's within your technical reach, you might consider a project to make the server case sensitive. I believe you can do that with a third party module like ISAPI Rewrite.

As a general rule, I would say avoid changing established URLs as much as you can - whether it's a question of case, or underscores, or any other URL peculiarity. Just go forward using the best practice.

[TheMadScientist]

I believe you can do that with a third party module like ISAPI Rewrite.

I use mixed case URLs, but only if I can use mod_rewrite to make them 'error correct', which is what I would probably recommend as even better than making the server case sensitive. (It's something you should be able to do with ISAPI Rewrite too, AFAIK.)

It's some work to do and it's probably best to hire someone who knows what they're doing to keep things efficient, but personally, the only way I use case is if I can redirect from /thepage to /ThePage I do the same thing for - and _ where I'll check for all 3 versions, /ThePage, /The_Page and /The-Page and redirect the incorrect two to the correct version.

I would not change them either, but I would do some extensive rewriting to make sure only one version is accessible and visitors end up at the correct location, the first try whenever possible.

[kmayer]

Thanks everyone. This is on IIS so regardless of if they go to MyPage.aspx or mypage.aspx, they are in fact going to the same page. I will keep as is and use all lower case moving forward.

[TheMadScientist]

I would definitely make sure you have a canonical link tag on the pages then.