When a little digging up, I found enough evidence to believe that…
1. Google searches are never case sensitive – as we have a tendency to already knew.
2. Google PR is case sensitive – as I suspected, in step with net standards, URLs are case sensitive. Google and alternative search engines follow this standard.
There have been a few reported cases of the same pages being in Google’s index 2 or additional times as a result of they were linked to with totally different cases (ie.: /ABC.htm, /abc.htm, /Abc.htm).
The foundation of the problem, as you’ll have guessed, is Microsoft’s ignorance towards internet standards. Microsoft servers are set up in opposition to the web standard on case sensitivity in which /ABC.htm is totally different from /abc.htm. IIS ignores the case completely different and gives management of the request to wrong file.
My web site is on a Windows Server, how dangerous is the problem?
Well, it isn’t going to ‘bring down the web’ as some lammers might counsel, but there are issues that need to be addressed. IIS’s choice to ignore case sensitivity means that search engines (that are case sensitive) will index the precise same content for various URLs. It’s very unlikely a website would be penalized for this, but it can definitelly impair your web site’s ability to rank well. It makes it specially troublesome for the duplicated page to rank well for the terms it targets.
This can be solely an issue if there are two or more links purpose to the identical URL in a very different case. You’ll avoid this problem by continually using lowercase in your link tags, but you can’t stop other websites linking into the same URL in capital letters – therefore one thing should be done on the server so as to house this issue.
How can I fix it?
I can almost image you “URL Rewrite Junkies” jumping up and down with the answer on your hands, however as we tend to all understand, URL Rewrite could be a feature solely accessible to correct internet-servers, nothing you’d expect to determine in IIS.
A. Server Component (IIS different to URL Rewrite)
Not free, not straightforward to setup and can only be installed on your own server. The sole upside is that this might work for all files/scripts/directories on the website.
B. Script (and a very little permanent redirection)
It’s free, it is simple to setup and will be put in on any server, not simply your own. The only draw back is that you can only enforce case sensitiveness for requests that are handled by this script. This suggests static HTML pages, directories, pictures, etc would still be exposed to the present issue. HOWEVER, if with a little facilitate from a custom 404 error page you’ll be able to do simply concerning anything. But that’s a whole other topic…
Here’s how you’d enforce case sensitiveness using VB Script:
Code: If Request.ServerVariables(“URL”)LCase(Request.ServerVariables(“URL”)) Then
Response.Status = 301 ‘Permanently Redirected
Response.AddHeader “Location”, LCase(Request.ServerVariables(“URL”))
Response.End()
End If
%> It doesn’t need to be the terribly 1st factor on every page, but so as to perform a correct permanent redirect, this has to be execute before any content is written to the response’s output stream, ie.: Before any HTML or Response.Write.
Hope this helps some up-and-returning SEO consultants (and wanna-bes)
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