Caps in a URL

[Eisenhuth]

Is it bad to have capital letters in a URL?

For example:

com/Articles/How-To-Swim

I had a brain freeze and made a whole site using caps like the URL above.

Should I change the URLs or leave it alone.

Thanks for your help.
Scott

[Jean-Luc]

It is not bad for SEO: search engines can read uppercase letters, but people will not be able to remember where the uppercase letters are in your URL's.

You could use 301 redirects to smoothly move visitors from com/Articles/How-To-Swim to com/articles/how-to-swim.

Jean-Luc

[Web Templates]

You can set it up so that the URL is not sensitive to caps, in other words the visitor still gets to that page regardless of whether there are capitals used in the URL or not.

[seosean]

Having caps in the URL will not have a negative effect on your rankings in the search engines. The thing you should be concerned with is duplicate content if you have 2 URLs cap and no caps displaying the same page content. You should also check out my blog post covering advice from Matt Cutts on URL and page names, Matt Cutt’s Advice On URLs & Page Names (http://www.seosean.com/blog/matt-cutts-advice-on-urls-page-names).

[Eisenhuth]

Thanks for the responses. Very helpful.

Webtemplates said "You can set it up so that the URL is not sensitive to caps, in other words the visitor still gets to that page regardless of whether there are capitals used in the URL or not."

I was wondering how to do that. What would I have to do?

Thanks,
Scott

[wige]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap upper2lower int:tolower
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /${upper2lower:$1} [R=301,L]
Note: RewriteMap does not always work in .htaccess files. You may need access to the httpd.conf file to implement this method. But, give it a try.

[febrin]

Hi,
u can use Upercase in URL but, but also make sure lower case url will get redirect to uppercase url.
use 301 redirect.

[Jean-Luc]

Url is not case sensitive.Yes and no.

1. A domain name is not case sensitive.
2. The rest of the URL is usually case sensitive depending on the web server:
- IIS: not case sensitive;
- Apache and almost all other servers: cases sensitive.

Jean-Luc

[regmac]

This things doesn't really matter much.. Bot sees those urls the same while human aren't. But who's responsible for indexation and positioning? The bots..

[Zonked]

Don't use CAPS. It will just complicate things and lead to buggy pages later on.

Keep everything lowercase.

[pycro]

Lowercase links works good for me. Less confused visitors.