Google and querystring parameter capitalization?

[battlestar123]

Hi, I looked on the web, but I could not find an answer to this. We all know that Google treats different capitalization of Urls as potentially duplicate content. For example:

http://www.example.com/Forum

and

http://www.example.com/forum

may result in duplicate content because "Forum" and "forum" have different capitalization for the letter "F".

My question is, what about querystring parameters? For example, will Google treat this as duplicate content?

http://www.example.com/forum?thread=1234

and

http://www.example.com/forum?Thread=1234

Here, the url has the same capitalization. However, the querystring parameter "Thread" and "thread" have different capitalization for the letter "T".

How does Google treat querystring parameter capitalization? Does it ignore querystring parameter capitalization or will different querystring parameter capitalization lead to duplicate content penalties from Google?

[aakk9999]

Different Query string prameter capitalisation results in duplicate content.

[battlestar123]

>Different Query string prameter capitalisation results in duplicate
>content.

Hi, do you know of any links where I could read up on this in more detail? Thanks!

[tedster]

Here's the rough outline:

1. Everything in a URL except for the domain name itself is case sensitive. [w3.org...]

2. Microsoft's IIS server did not follow this standard, making for a lot of confusion. Apache, rightly, has been on the money from the beginning.

3. WebmasterWorld has a large number of threads discussing various aspects of dealing with this tangle. Here's a site search. [site:webmasterworld.com url case sensitive] [google.com]

[g1smd]

However, the wider question has to be "why are you still using query strings in 2012?"

[battlestar123]

>.1. Everything in a URL except for the domain name itself is case
>sensitive.

It sounds like even the variables for the parameters are case sensitive if this is true! I suppose http://www.example.com?thread=first and http://www.example.com?thread=First (where the variable "first" and "First" have different capitalization) would result in duplicate content.

[battlestar123]

>However, the wider question has to be "why are you still using
>query strings in 2012?"

Not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that one should URL Rewrite querystring parameters to a static URL?

[g1smd]

You should link to static-looking URLs from the pages of your site. Users click those links and the browser makes a URL request. Rewrite those requests to your internal path with query string.

Rewrites don't make a URL, they act on the request after the link has been clicked.