Google PR is Case Sensitive
When a little digging up, I found enough evidence to believe that…
1. Google searches are never case sensitive - as we have a tendency to already knew.
2. Google PR is case sensitive - as I suspected, per internet standards, URLs are case sensitive. Google and alternative search engines follow this standard.
There are a few reported cases of the identical pages being in Google’s index 2 or a lot of times because they were linked to with totally different cases (ie.: /ABC.htm, /abc.htm, /Abc.htm).
The root of the matter, as you will have guessed, is Microsoft’s ignorance towards net standards. Microsoft servers are founded in opposition to the internet normal on case sensitivity in which /ABC.htm is totally different from /abc.htm. IIS ignores the case completely different and provides management of the request to wrong file.
My site is on a Windows Server, how dangerous is the problem?
Well, it isn’t going to ‘bring down the net’ as some lammers might recommend, but there are problems that require to be addressed. IIS’s choice to ignore case sensitivity means that search engines (that are case sensitive) will index the precise same content for different URLs. It’s very unlikely a website would be penalized for this, however it can definitelly impair your website’s ability to rank well. It makes it specially troublesome for the duplicated page to rank well for the terms it targets.
This is only a difficulty if there are 2 or additional links purpose to the identical URL in a very completely different case. You’ll be able to avoid this drawback by perpetually using lowercase in your link tags, but you can’t stop different websites linking into the same URL in capital letters - so something must be done on the server in order to deal with this issue.
How will I fix it?
I can nearly picture you “URL Rewrite Junkies” jumping up and down with the solution on your hands, but as we have a tendency to all recognize, URL Rewrite could be a feature only accessible to proper internet-servers, nothing you’d expect to determine in IIS.
A. Server Part (IIS alternative to URL Rewrite)
Not free, not simple to setup and will solely be put in on your own server. The sole upside is that this might work for all files/scripts/directories on the website.
B. Script (and a little permanent redirection)
It’s free, it is easy to setup and will be put in on any server, not just your own. The only downside is that you’ll solely enforce case sensitiveness for requests that are handled by this script. This means static HTML pages, directories, images, etc would still be exposed to the current issue. HOWEVER, if with a very little facilitate from a custom 404 error page you’ll do just about anything. But that’s a full different topic…
Here’s how you’d enforce case sensitiveness using VB Script:
Code: If Request.ServerVariables(”URL”)LCase(Request.ServerVariables(”URL”)) Then
Response.Standing = 301 ‘Permanently Redirected
Response.AddHeader “Location”, LCase(Request.ServerVariables(”URL”))
Response.End()
End If
%> It doesn’t would like to be the terribly 1st issue on each page, but so as to perform a correct permanent redirect, this needs to be execute before any content is written to the response’s output stream, ie.: Before any HTML or Response.Write.
Hope this helps some up-and-coming SEO experts (and wanna-bes)
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Tags: business, ecommerce, google, internet business, Internet Marketing, Online Business, online marketing, page rank