Case-Sensitive URLs From An SEO Perspective

Here's an SEO tip you need to take into consideration while working on the technical optimizations for your website.

Google is case sensitive, which means that anything in the URL other than the domain name will be case-sensitive too. So let's say you want to visit my blog and you type seofreelancer.ae/blog or seofreelancer.ae/BLOG while both are the same page and will return the same content, for Google, they are considered 2 different pages (URLs) with identical content (duplicate pages! Yikes!!!).

Let's see how Youtube - a Google product - handles this:

This is the URL for a video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB_TC92I8w

Now try the same URL but with one - or more letters - capitalized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMB_TC92I8w

You'll find yourself redirected to another page (Neil Patel Youtube channel). Why is this? simply because youtube doesn't consider the lower-case URL as equivalent to the capitalized URL and therefore redirects you to the channel instead of sending you to a 404 page.

What does all of this mean?

• Google is case-sensitive, the same URLs with different cases is considered 2 different URLs.
• If your website returns the same page for capitalized URLs as the lower case URLs, you are in danger of having duplicate content issues as both URLs can be indexed by Google if someone uses them!
• If someone links to an upper-case URL, it will get indexed by Google! So people can easily spam your website by linking to capitalized URLs from your website.
• The best way to handle this is to use rel=canonical tag to indicate to search engines - and Google - which is your preferred version. You can also create 301 redirects from the upper-case to the lower-case URL.

You may want to try this WordPress plugin: Case-insensitive-URLs. Personally, I haven't tried it and I didn't address the issue here on my website yet because I am so busy (v. embarrassing for an SEO). But I will definitely do as soon as I have time :)

This was just a quick SEO note! See you again SEOS!

** This post was published first on my blog_ the place I consider to be my study room :)