Google, Variables and Case-Sensitivity

Will google merge variables in different cases

[nick420]

We run our sites using primarily Apache webserver. We recently changed our variable names to remove the word ID out of them. During the process some variable names lost consistency in case. Example:

www.myurl.com/SOMEVAR=1
www.myurl.com/SomeVar=1
www.myurl.com/somevar=1

Now in google we have duplicate content on some of these pages, where it will show up the same page but different cases of the variable names like show above. My question is will google merge these records or treat them as seperate documents. If so, should I expect heavy penalties for dup content?

-Nick

[takagi]

Hi nick420, Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

If so, should I expect heavy penalties for dup content?

No heavy penalties, some of the spidered pages might have a lower PageRank for some time because the PR is spread over 'different' pages. By default Google will filter pages in the SERP when the snippet resolves to the same string. Especially for pages from the same site. Once the links are corrected, the problem will slowly go away.

[g1smd]

Continued in: [webmasterworld.com...]