![]() Why Case-Sensitive URLs Matter Case Sensitivity Can Cause 404 Errors While not common, we sometimes see businesses purposely linking to uppercase versions of pages of their site in the main navigation, footers, or other places of the site, even when lowercase is the default. Some popular eCommerce platforms (such as Volusion and Shopify) default to allowing both uppercase and lowercase URLs to be accessible, so you’ll need to take extra steps to make sure only one version is accessible and/or linked to throughout the site. Linux servers are case sensitive, and this is where you normally run into issues (more on that below). They also don’t have as much freedom as Linux servers do, so most people choose to host their websites on Linux. For one, Windows servers typically cost more than Linux servers. However, there are some drawbacks to these servers. Windows servers are normally case insensitive, so upper- and lowercase URLs typically won’t be a problem there. How Different Servers Handle Case Sensitivity Pages will show up as duplicates in analytics.Google might index the version of the URL you don’t want to be indexed.Search engines will consider variations of the same page to be duplicate content (learn more about that here ).Search engines consider uppercase and lowercase URLs to be different pages.Case sensitivity can result in 404 errors.Here are a few reasons why you need to consider case sensitivity on your website. But making that happen does require some precautions otherwise, it can cause some major headaches down the road. Having a mix of uppercase and lowercase URLs on your website isn’t always a problem, as long as the search engines aren’t able to find both versions. Google, like any other computer system, will read a line of text and treat uppercase and lowercase letters differently! On Apache servers, you have the ability to show completely different content on URLs that have the same page name when the page name has different cases (for example: /case-sensitivity vs. And that’s because, technically, those URLs could be unique versions. If a page on your site can be accessed with both uppercase and lowercase letters, Google will treat every variation as a separate version. And, if you have both upper- and lowercase versions of your site’s domain, you may be unintentionally making Google’s job harder - and hurting your site’s own performance. It may surprise you but, yes, URLs are case sensitive. Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on May 15, 2013, and has been updated for completeness and accuracy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |