Case Sensitive URLs - Problem?

[yoyo8]

I use capital letters in some of my urls. Recently I started validating them so it gives a 404 for those that don't match the case. So my questions are:

1. Why would a bot lower case all urls?

2. Should urls be case-insensitive? In which case I would need to alter the validation script so it's case-insensitive.

[jomaxx]

I've seen some stupid bots do exactly that, and get 404's all over my site.

I'm sure Google is brighter than this, but keep in mind that you could have lots of incoming links that have the wrong capitalization. Those links will stop working, and Google will keep trying to spider them. I would suggest using a permanent (301) redirect to the correct URL if possible, using the .htaccess file or whatever.

[Net_Wizard]

There's no case sensitive for domain names as in

domain.com, Domain.com and dOmain.com - are all the same

You can only aply case sensitivity to file names as in

domain.com/file.html
domain.com/File.html
domain.com/fIle.html

each are different URL, the same thing with Directories, as in

domain.com/directory/
domain.com/Directory/
domain.com/diRectory/

each are different

You are in Google forum, I would assume that you are talking about googlebot. Googlebot will access your file name the way you construct/name it.

Unless of course you're talking of something else.

[GoogleGuy]

Case sensitivity shouldn't be a problem for Googlebot, but if people link to your page with the wrong url (because the case is wrong), that can cause problems. It's easy for people to make mistakes like that. Personally, I recommend using all lower-case urls if you can. That's a tradition that has endured pretty well on the web.

Hope that helps,
GoogleGuy