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OpportunitiesTechnicalIssue ReferenceURLCapital letters in the URL path

Capital letters in the URL path

What it is

The path of the page’s URL, the part after the domain, contains one or more capital letters, as in /Blog/Pricing-Guide. Domains ignore case, but paths do not: to search engines and to most servers, /Blog/Pricing-Guide and /blog/pricing-guide are two different addresses.

Why it matters

Google treats  /APPLE and /apple as separate URLs with their own content. People who retype an address usually type it in lowercase, so a link written that way lands on a 404 or on a second copy of the page, and link signals split between the versions. Mixed case is also harder to read aloud or retype. If every link already uses the exact casing, the cost is small.

How Asky checks it

Asky checks the page’s URL as your sitemap lists it. The page is reported when the path contains any capital letter; the domain and the query string are not checked. Percent-encoding such as %C3%A9 is left out, so an accented or encoded path is not reported for its capital hex digits. The check runs in every audit, including audits of selected pages, on every page whose HTML Asky fetched; a page answering 4xx or 5xx is reported for its status alone. A URL that redirects to another audited page reports only the redirect.

Reported as a warning with low severity.

How to fix it

  1. Weigh the change first. A new or low-traffic page is worth lowercasing now; an established page that performs well needs time to be re-crawled at a new address.
  2. Change the path to lowercase in the page’s slug or route, for example /blog/pricing-guide.
  3. Add a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one, so existing links and bookmarks keep working.
  4. List the new URL in your sitemap and in the page’s canonical tag. An old URL left in the sitemap is reported as a redirect.
  5. Update your internal links to the new URL. Links left on the old address are reported as links to internal redirects.
  6. Optionally, have the server redirect any mixed-case request to its lowercase form, so future typos still land on the page.
  7. To leave it as it is: if the URL is established and every link uses its exact casing, mark the issue resolved.

Example

https://example.com/Blog/Pricing-Guide is listed in the sitemap. After the change, the sitemap and every internal link name https://example.com/blog/pricing-guide, and the old address answers with a 301 to it.

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OverviewDouble slash in the URL path