The "Kihlepa" pages linked from the footer are quite something.
How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
BUT, I've seen case sensitive interpretation of email addresses on a microsoft mail server. (no kidding)
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html SMTP RFC 2821 says that the local part of the email address is case sensitive. Some ignore this and consider upper and lower case the same. Section 2.4: > The local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive. Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case of mailbox local-parts. Mailbox domains are not case sensitive.
same section, same RFC:
> However, exploiting the case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and is discouraged.Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html SMTP RFC 2821 says that the local part of the email address is case sensitive. Some ignore this and consider upper and lower case the same. Section 2.4: > The local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive. Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case of mailbox local-parts. Mailbox domains are not case sensitive.
same section, same RFC: > However, exploiting the case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and is discouraged.
These are of course not in conflict.
What it means is, a mailserver should resolve local part case-insensitively, so that Bob@example.com and bob@example.com end up in the same mailbox.
But, to be spec-compliant, a mailserver MUST send on an email addressed to AlIcE@example.net to AlIcE@example.net, exactly, without downcasing it to alice@example.net.
I'd imagine this is often honored in the breach, but there you have it.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
same section, same RFC: > However, exploiting the case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and is discouraged.
These are of course not in conflict. What it means is, a mailserver should resolve local part case-insensitively, so that Bob@example.com and bob@example.com end up in the same mailbox. But, to be spec-compliant, a mailserver MUST send on an email addressed to AlIcE@example.net to AlIcE@example.net, exactly, without downcasing it to alice@example.net. I'd imagine this is often honored in the breach, but there you hav…
"mail server" is ambiguous. SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is about transferring mail between domains, which must preserve the local part.
An MDA Mail Delivery Agent or LDA Local Delivery Agent inside a domain can choose whether to be case sensitive, but is discouraged from doing so.
The same issue exists for dots '.' in local part.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#15One case where this poses a problem is a dictionary site that supports acronyms or proper nouns.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#16> Monitoring the server logs showed that Bingbot only crawled the lowercase version of the URL. I've always thought it was much more common that sites written in ASP.Net have case-sensitive URLs. At least that was quite common ~5 years ago (was it a default setting or something? I haven't done .Net stuff in a while). So it's pretty crazy that Bing only crawls lowercased URLs.
That's overstating the "case" (pun!). Ignoring or normalizing case is different from ignoring a non-redundant URL with uppercase.
But it might cause problems if the IIS server isn't properly case-preserving to normalize back to the standard (possibly capitalized) form.
Mac filesystem was nicely case-preserving but case-agnostic in this way, going back decades.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#17> There were four test URLs in total, two of which tested for how search engines deal with unique content ... > There is one unusual thing, however – a site: search brings up the lowercase URL, but the uppercase URL is filtered out for being too similar to the other displayed URLs and isn’t shown unless the ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included’ link is clicked. Maybe the content isn't unique enough so…
Yes, Google doesn't say the URL is similar, it says the "result" is similar.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#18> Monitoring the server logs showed that Bingbot only crawled the lowercase version of the URL. I've always thought it was much more common that sites written in ASP.Net have case-sensitive URLs. At least that was quite common ~5 years ago (was it a default setting or something? I haven't done .Net stuff in a while). So it's pretty crazy that Bing only crawls lowercased URLs.
That's overstating the "case" (pun!). Ignoring or normalizing case is different from ignoring a non-redundant URL with uppercase. But it might cause problems if the IIS server isn't properly case-preserving to normalize back to the standard (possibly capitalized) form. Mac filesystem was nicely case-preserving but case-agnostic in this way, going back decades.
It’s still like this by default, which can cause issues when working with folders created on other platforms.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#19> Monitoring the server logs showed that Bingbot only crawled the lowercase version of the URL. I've always thought it was much more common that sites written in ASP.Net have case-sensitive URLs. At least that was quite common ~5 years ago (was it a default setting or something? I haven't done .Net stuff in a while). So it's pretty crazy that Bing only crawls lowercased URLs.
I've found bing explicitly requesting lower-case versions of my urls despite mixed case being submitted in the sitemap.
Now I either 301 redirect to the proper-case url or ensure I have canonical tags set up.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
BUT, I've seen case sensitive interpretation of email addresses on a microsoft mail server. (no kidding)
Email addresses are case sensitive, at least you’re supposed to assume they are.
Are there any widely-used, case-sensitive, public or corporate email servers?
I've certainly strtolower'ed some email inputs...