I just bought a GPS unit (I'll tell you everything about it soon) and when doing some searches I noticed something peculiar when I disabled the filters and asked Google to show me everything.
Click the image for a larger version.
Google has a duplicate content problem with case sensitive URLs. This is not a problem concerning specs but … this is somehow common sense issue. How can I tell others to link to me without altering the URL letters? Why would same address with different case be considered different? A street address with different case is different for any of you?
On the other hand not everybody is expert in .htaccess and can use .htaccess rules to fix this problem and Google should have taken the necessary steps and keep their index clean. I really think Google wants to have the biggest index and is willing to swallow any junk just to brag about the billions of non-unique indexed pages.
This matter is also discussed here by the WebMasterWorld fanatics and they live by the rules. Unfortunately the changing of the case in URL is not in reach of all webmasters and Google should look up to Microsoft and how they handle URLs and file paths.
I have not found any easy fixes only at .htaccess level that would satisfy my needs for short and concise code but made a simple PHP workaround which consists of 2 changes. One to your .htaccess file:
# ReRoute Uppercase Containing URLs
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ lcaseurl\.php\?url=\/$1 [L,NC]
and the lcaseurl.php PHP file that needs to exist in the root folder of your website:
<?
// Check if URL is passed as parameter
if(strlen($_GET['url'])){
// Redirect to the lower-case version permanently
header("HTTP/1.0 301 Resource Moved Permanently");
header("Location: ".strtolower($_GET['url'])."");
exit();
}
// If not URL passed return a 404
header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");
?>
… will redirect any URL containing upper-case characters to the lower cased version and help Google keep the index cleaner and the page count of your site a little more towards its real value.
PS: To see this trick in action capitalize some letters in the address bar and hit enter. See how it will change back to lower-case.
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