
How to make URLs case-friendly: 301 redirects, or just show the page anyway? - benhoyt

======
benhoyt
URLs are case-sensitive, but on most sites they probably shouldn't be. For
example, /users/Ben should work as well as /users/ben. This is true even if
you have canonical links on your own site, because other sites may link them
wrong, or a user will manually type in /users/Ben because he normally types
his name capitalized.

Well, it's easy to just return the same page for /users/ben and /users/Ben,
but is that the best thing to do? Or is a 301 redirect the better way? (So
that users, including Google, never see the non-canonical URL.)

I notice reddit uses a 301 redirect for the likes of
<http://reddit.com/user/BenHoyt> \-- but some other sites just show the page
anyway, like <http://www.trademe.co.nz/ART/InDeX.HtM> \-- and still other
sites are simply case-sensitive: <http://images.google.com/ImageS>

~~~
willarson
I would use redirects, the reason is that search engines will catalog the
different URLs as separate destinations and thus lower your pagerank for that
page, along with their positions in search results. Its best to have only one
accessible url per destination.

