yourfriendwayne
New Member
Hi guys,Some of you have have seen my previous post (a couple of months back now) regarding Google not recognising keywords in a URL if they are capitalised. For example, the keyword phrase 'the keyword' would be recognised in 'www.asite/the_keyword.html' but not in 'www.asite/The_Keyword.html'.IPrior to this, I changed my URLs to have keywrod phrases in them but (not realising the consequences) they all had mixed case (capital at the start of every word) as I thought it made them read easier.Anyway, I've now changed the URL again so that it is all lower case.When I did this before, I changed the old url to have a permanent redirect (301) to help let the search engine know that there was no funny business going on.BUT, because I'm just changing the case of the file name, this no longer works. Why - well having two file names on the server with different case (but same spelling) just serves to get the Apache web server confused and prompt the use to choose which file they want - which is very bad.Thus, I've just removed the old Upper case ones at the moment - but am now worried that the search engine might not see the change in a positive light. Now, I'm assuming here that Apache automatically creates the redirect (I certainly don't) but have no idea what sort of redirect it is.Does anyone else have experience of this?Alternatively, do people know ...1. What sort of redirect would be created by Apachae (or how I find this out).2. If Google will penalise me for changing th name (note that some of the old URLs had a PR and the new ones have none).Thanks,MikeI have changed case in file names (when porting to *nix servers), and None of the search engines had a problem with ranking or PR.Did you also change the path or URL to the file?Hi rtchar,Thanks for the reply.The path has remained the same.However, I checked a page with a known PR and after the case change the PR is lost (though hopefully just until Google re-indexes it). Thus 'SamplePage.php' previously has a PR score but after changing the file name to 'samplepage.php' the page was not recognised by Google.I wasn't too concerned by this as I hadn't expected Google to treat them as the same page because of the case difference - but just don't know how it views the redirect (or even what sort of redirect takes place as the Apache server does it automatically).Did you find before that your pages were not indexed for Google for a while whilst the new ones got taken up?Thanks,MikeI think you would have been better off using dashes when you renamed your files, sample-page.html. You would have avoided the Apache problem and maintained ease of reading.Be careful though. One or two dashes are fine, no more. A file name like best-pc-prices-anywhere.com is sure to get nailed by a spam filter.Also, I've started using an extension of 'shtml' on new pages. These allow server side scripts. So, if you ever have to redirect a specific page, you can by adding the 301 directive to the header.