How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#2tl;dr - Google crawls both, but site: searches hide one of them as similar results. Bing doesn't even bother crawling the other versions.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#3For years (if not decades) case haven’t been important in file names nor URL in the Microsoft world (using web server on a MS computer will result as this exact experience concerning letter case. An Image.jpg or IMAGE.JPG will only show one of the two images).
Could this be an extension of that ? Looks like.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#4> 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 Google's duplicate detection algorithm marks them as duplicate?
The two examples contain similar keywords and don't seem to have any outgoing links. A human would probably flag them as spun articles so I wouldn't be surprised if Google did the same.
Maybe the results would be different if each link was a unique high quality article instead.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#5> 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.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#6For years (if not decades) case haven’t been important in file names nor URL in the Microsoft world (using web server on a MS computer will result as this exact experience concerning letter case. An Image.jpg or IMAGE.JPG will only show one of the two images). Could this be an extension of that ? Looks like.
BUT, I've seen case sensitive interpretation of email addresses on a microsoft mail server. (no kidding)
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#7For years (if not decades) case haven’t been important in file names nor URL in the Microsoft world (using web server on a MS computer will result as this exact experience concerning letter case. An Image.jpg or IMAGE.JPG will only show one of the two images). Could this be an extension of that ? Looks like.
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.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#8Earlier 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.
[deleted]
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#9Would have been interesting to see how case differences in the host name portion of the URL were treated. Domain names are case insensitive — would google search both https://foo.example.com/bar and https://foo.Example.com/bar? It should not.
Re: How do search engines treat trailing slashes and capital letters in URLs?
#10For years (if not decades) case haven’t been important in file names nor URL in the Microsoft world (using web server on a MS computer will result as this exact experience concerning letter case. An Image.jpg or IMAGE.JPG will only show one of the two images). Could this be an extension of that ? Looks like.
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.