• milanzokovich-sh3jqL0l

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI
          Moz Local

          Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        3
        11
        3813
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • friendoffood
          friendoffood last edited by

          This search   -  site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix

          gives me this result from Google:

          Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
          https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
          Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.

          and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'.  When I click to see it I get:

          Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
          https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
          Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products.

          This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended.

          I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice.  Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls?  And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • friendoffood
            friendoffood @AMHC last edited by

            Hi AMHC,

            It makes sense that without hardly any backlinks built up Google wont find my upper case URLS since all the page links have been changed, however, I am writing out all of the urls that are redirected into email, and from that I can tell that Google is finding them--I guess they may have a list of urls from prior indexing that they crawl independent of what their crawler comes up with.

            I'll keep looking to see what they have indexed and if it turns out they just aren't crawling certain pages, will put them in a sitemap to be crawled..It's a good idea for taking care of the problem quickly--so if it progresses too slowly I'll do that.

            Thanks very much for your answers!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • AMHC
              AMHC last edited by

              Google needs to crawl the bad pages that you 301d. If there are no live links to those pages, then Google can't find them to 301. In short, if you created new lower case URLs, you just increased your duplicate content problem.

              To solve this problem, build an HTML sitemap with all of the bad URLs. Have Google fetch and submit the page and all of the pages it links to. Google will crawl all of your old pages and apply the 301s.

              friendoffood 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • friendoffood
                friendoffood @AMHC last edited by

                Thanks AMHC.  In my case, I just don't have many back links so I don't have the urgency that you faced with getting Google to see all the redirects.  But, I'm still not understanding--it sounds like you believe that once google sees the redirect it removes the old uppercase from its index.  It doesn't look to me like that is what happened in my case because Google is currently indexing BOTH, and so that means it has crawled my new lowercase and I know it isn't crawling any uppercase anymore (it cant--all are redirected).  So, that's why I wonder if I have to remove those uppercase urls...does that make sense or am I just not understanding it still?

                EDIT: I just discovered I wasn't doing a 301 direct so it wasn't considered a permanent move.  That, if I understand it right, will remove the upper case from googles index permanently.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • AMHC
                  AMHC last edited by

                  Canonicals still drain link juice. Canonicals aren't like a 301. The link juice still stays on the canocalized page. All a canonical does is tell Google, in the case of duplicate content, which page is primary. Canonicals handle the duplicate content issue, they do not handle the link juice issue. If I have 2 pages: /product-name/ and /product-name=?khdfpohfo/ that are duplicates, you can via canonical, tell Google to ignore the page with the variable string and rank the page without the variable string. If the page with the variable string has links, the link juice stays on the page.

                  The HTML Sitemap is there to tell Google about the 301s. the sitemap would look like this:

                  www.fubar.com/Bad-URL-1/

                  www.fubar.com/Bad-URL-2/ etc.

                  After you do the 301 redirect, as well as set up parameters in the .htaccess file (I think - not the developer on this), everything should redirect to the lower case URL. The problem is that if you do a 301 redirect for your entire site, Google may not figure it out too quickly. When it crawls your home page downward, it's only going to see the new URLs, and can't crawl the old 301 URLs because there aren't any internal links pointing at them. The only way Google will see the 301 is via an external backlink.  The way we solved this was to create an HTML sitemap of all of the old upper case URLs. We then had Google fetch and index/crawl the sitemap. As it crawls the sitemap, where all of the URLs are 301 redirects, it will likewise point all of the Link Juice at the new URLs.

                  friendoffood 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • friendoffood
                    friendoffood @Hutch42 last edited by

                    I gotcha.  Yeah, different thing going on here..these urls can be really difficult!  I have uppercase lowercase, https http, urls that have different content(not just formatting) for mobile as desktop and vice versa, mobile urls that dont even exist for desktop, and desktop urls that dont exist for mobile..all under the same domain.  1000s of internal pages....In the desire to create a good website for users I've created an SEO monster  because I didn't realize the many consequences with regard to search indexes.

                    If you know a true expert in these areas I need him/her.  4 years on this site, its live finally (2 months), and now I'm discovering all of these things have to be fixed, but i can't afford thousands of dollars..I'll do the work, I just need the knowledge!

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Hutch42
                      Hutch42 @friendoffood last edited by

                      I see where you are coming from, and I do not have a good answer then, when I did a lowercase redirect I started by creating the new lowercase pages then setting canonical to them.  After a few months I removed the uppercase versions and redirected them to the new lowercase.

                      friendoffood 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • friendoffood
                        friendoffood @Hutch42 last edited by

                        Hutch, thanks.

                        The site is dynamic with thousands of pages that are now being redirected to lower case, so I'm not seeing how using canonical would work because the upper case urls aren't on the site anymore. I guess I think of canonical as being useful when you have ongoing content on the site that duplicates one or more other pages on the same site.  In my case none of the upper case urls exist anymore so they don't have 'ongoing' content.  I'm still new to this so if it sounds like I have it wrong, please correct me.

                        Hutch42 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • Hutch42
                          Hutch42 last edited by

                          Another quick fix would be to use a canonical tag on all of your pages pointing to the full lowercase versions.

                          So for the URLs example.com/UPPER; example.com/Upper; and example.com/upper you would place the following into the head so Google knows that these are just variations of the same page, and if will point search to the desired page example.com/upper

                          https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

                          friendoffood 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • friendoffood
                            friendoffood @AMHC last edited by

                            AMHC, thank you for your response.  I'm in the middle of quite a mess, as this is one of several issues, so really appreciate your help.  I must confess to not following everything you wrote exactly:

                            In your situation, I think i understand the redirect -- it is the same reason I am doing a redirect--it is so that anyone coming from to this site with uppercase in it will end up on the lower case page, and in the case of google will then index the page as a lower case page.  BTW, for me that has been easy as I am doing it via php -- if the url doesn't equal its strtolower of the url , then I redirect to strtolower.

                            I think I get what you are saying about the sitemap -- it speeds up google crawling the site and seeing that all those upper cases should be lowercase from your redirect.  In my case, i don't have the concern about Google discovering them as you did because my site is only a couple months old.  And, I never have given Google a sitemap so many of my pages aren't crawled yet (I am trying to clean up my entire url structure before i submit a sitemap to them--however they have already crawled perhaps 20% of the site, so I'm now trying to examine what google has crawled and how it has been indexed to figure out what needs to be done).

                            What I'm not understanding is this:  It seems to me that what you described should succeed for going forward to getting both Google and your users to the right ending page, but I don't see how it removes the prior uppercase urls from Google's index.  What is it that tells Google your prior upper case urls should no longer be in their index?  Is it the fact that they aren't in the sitemap you provide now?  Or, do they literally have to be removed using some kind of removal or disavow tool?  I discovered this (as you see in the op) because Google appears to never have removed the Uppercase ones even though they are indexing the lower case now.

                            Ted

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • AMHC
                              AMHC last edited by

                              We had the same issue. Boy, was it an education. I had no idea that URLs were case sensitive for Google, and neither did my SEO buddies. I bet if you asked 100 SEOs if URLs were case sensitive for Google, 95 would answer "No". We discovered the problem in GWT and GA when they had different statistics for the mixed case and all lower case versions of the URL. We believed that we had both a duplicate content issue as well as a link juice splitting issue, with backlinks being pointed at both URLs.

                              We solved the problem by doing a 301 redirect, but as we are an ecommerce site with thousands of products, it was a messy process. We had to redirect pretty much every page on the site since the mixed case categories contaminated subcategories and products.

                              The 301 went pretty smoothly, and we saw a minor bump up in some of our Rankings. I would strongly suggest that you create an HTML sitemap for every upper case URL that you are going to 301. Here were our thoughts - we could be wrong on this. If we just 301 a page, and don't tell Google, then Google won't know about it unless it tries to crawl the page. We felt like we needed to show Google that all of the pages are being redirected asap. Create an HTML sitemap with all of your upper case URLs. After you do the 301, have Google fetch and index the sitemap page and all of the pages that it links to. Leave the map up for a few days, and then you can take it down. This will expedite moving the link juice to the correct pages as Google will index the 301 for every page in the sitemap.

                              friendoffood 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                              • 1 / 1
                              • First post
                                Last post

                              Browse Questions

                              Explore more categories

                              • Moz Tools

                                Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                              • SEO Tactics

                                Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                              • Community

                                Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                              • Digital Marketing

                                Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                              • Research & Trends

                                Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                              • Support

                                Connect on product support and feature requests.

                              • See all categories

                              Related Questions

                              • Jackson21

                                Changing Url Removes Backlink

                                Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson21
                                0
                              • ioannisa

                                Mass Removal Request from Google Index

                                Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website.  When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts.  This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012.  So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
                                https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove.  Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404?  I believe this is very wrong.  As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
                                https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
                                http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
                                0
                              • AMHC

                                Removing duplicate content

                                Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC
                                0
                              • iam-sold

                                Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index

                                I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold
                                0
                              • romanbond

                                Redirecting index.html to the root

                                Hi, I was wondering if there is a safe way to consolidate link juice on a single version of a home page. I find incoming links to my site that link to both mysite.com/ and mysite.com/index.html. I've decided to go with mysite.com/ as my main and only URL for the site and now I'd like to transfer all link juice from mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com/
                                When i tried 301 redirect from index.html to the root it created an indefinite loop, of course. I know I can use a RewriteRule.., but will it transfer the juice?? Please help!

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
                                7
                              • BeytzNet

                                Should I remove Meta Keywords tags?

                                Hi, Do you recommend removing Meta Keywords or is there "nothing to lose" with having them? Thanks

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
                                0
                              • kylesuss

                                Should I Use City Name in URL?

                                Having a website designed for a car dealership and deciding what attributes to use in the URL. Should I include the city name in the URL? Or does that help for SEO purposes? Other ideas of what to research or try are appreciated too. Thanks 🙂

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss
                                0
                              • CareerBliss

                                Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?

                                We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss
                                0

                              Get started with Moz Pro!

                              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                              Start my free trial
                              Products
                              • Moz Pro
                              • Moz Local
                              • Moz API
                              • Moz Data
                              • STAT
                              • Product Updates
                              Moz Solutions
                              • SMB Solutions
                              • Agency Solutions
                              • Enterprise Solutions
                              • Digital Marketers
                              Free SEO Tools
                              • Domain Authority Checker
                              • Link Explorer
                              • Keyword Explorer
                              • Competitive Research
                              • Brand Authority Checker
                              • Local Citation Checker
                              • MozBar Extension
                              • MozCast
                              Resources
                              • Blog
                              • SEO Learning Center
                              • Help Hub
                              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                              • How-to Guides
                              • Moz Academy
                              • API Docs
                              About Moz
                              • About
                              • Team
                              • Careers
                              • Contact
                              Why Moz
                              • Case Studies
                              • Testimonials
                              Get Involved
                              • Become an Affiliate
                              • MozCon
                              • Webinars
                              • Practical Marketer Series
                              • MozPod
                              Connect with us

                              Contact the Help team

                              Join our newsletter
                              Moz logo
                              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                              • Accessibility
                              • Terms of Use
                              • Privacy

                              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.