Search engine spiders

[malcolmcroucher]

do spiders see the difference between widget.php and Widget.php ?

Would this cause any problems ?

for instance if the page is labeled widget.php in the link yet is named Widget.php ?

Regards

Malcolm

[piatkow]

No idea about spiders but if your site is on a Unix platform the link is case sensitive and would fail anyway.

[jdMorgan]

Search engines index URLs, not "pages" or "files," so any difference whatsoever in the URL-path means that it is a different URL and will be treated separately by search engines. Those are the rules of HTTP, and it is not up to the spiders -- It is set by the HTTP protocol.

For inner peace and happiness, use lowercase-only URLs and filenames. Should you deem it necessary to use mixed-case URLs for marketing purposes (e.g. for readability in a print ad), then 301-redirect the resulting mixed-case requests to all-lowercase when they hit your server.

Doing so will avoid problems in search, and also make it possible to switch from IIS to Apache or vice-versa. This may not sound like a big advantage until you actually have to do it, and find that the code needed to 'clean up' mixed-case URLs can be huge, and that it must stay on the server until all the old links from other sites are updated or removed -- possibly forever.

Jim

[phranque]

the spider will index the url in the link unless it is redirected.
if the lower case link does not resolve or redirect on your server, it will index as a 404.