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How do I know if I am correctly solving an uppercase url issue that may be affecting Googlebot?
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We have a large e-commerce site (10k+ SKUs). https://www.flagandbanner.com.
As I have begun analyzing how to improve it I have discovered that we have thousands of urls that have uppercase characters. For instance: https://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/patriotic-paper-lanterns-string-lights.asp.
This is inconsistently applied throughout the site. I directed our website vendor to fix the issue and they placed 301 redirects via a rule to the web.config file. Any url that contains an uppercase character now displays as a lowercase.
However, as I use screaming frog to monitor our site, I see all these 301 redirects--thousands of them. The XML sitemap still shows the the uppercase versions. We have had indexing issues as well. So I'm wondering what is the most effective way to make sure that I'm not placing an extra burden on Googlebot when they index our site? Should I have just not cared about the uppercase issue and let it alone?
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Not that I've noticed... I started with the company back in February and noticed it when I crawled the site with Screaming Frog. So they already had uppercase and lowercase permalinks back then. When I brought it to our developers attention they didn't seem to concerned. Then I saw something somewhere that discussed Google seeing them as potential duplicates. Which is when I posted to MOZ and got the response that it was fine since we have canonical URLs in place. So, it has not had any negative effect since I started that I can see. However, I don't know how to correct Screaming Frog from seeing as duplicate pages.
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Thanks for sharing this, Lindsay! Helpful. Have you seen any negative effects that stem from both uppercase and lowercase urls still being accessible?
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I had the same issue in Screaming Frog and posted to Moz Q&A a few weeks ago about it that was resolved.
https://moz.rainyclouds.online/community/q/uppercase-lowercase-reading-as-duplicate-permalinks
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This is really helpful. Thank you!
Mike
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It was still a good idea to create the redirects for the upper-case versions to help cut down duplicate content issues. Rel-canonical "could" have been used, but I find it's much better to actually redirect.
But that means the lower-case URLs are the canonical URLs, so ONLY they should appear in the sitemap. (Sitemaps aren't supposed to contain any URLs that redirect.) Right now, you're giving the search crawlers contradictory directives, and they don't do well with those
For additional cleanup, it would be good to have rules added to the CMS so that upper-case URL slugs cannot be created in the first place. Also run a check (can probably be done in the database) to ensure that any internal links on the site have been re-written NOT to use the uppercase URLs. there's no sense generating unnecessary redirects for URLs you control. (I suspect this is the majority of the cases that Screaming Frog is picking up.) You need to ensure all navigation and internal links are using the canonical lowercase version.
The more directly the crawlers can access the final URL, the better your indexing will be. So don't have the sitemap sending them through redirects, and don't let your site's internal links do so either.
Hope that helps?
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