6 replies to this topic

[DJKay]

Hi,


I know this sounds like a dumb question...I noticed that in my analytics program one of my pages is showing up in two instances. Its the same page, its just that one instance is capitalized and one is not...i.e.....www.mysight.com/Page.com and www.mysight.com/page.com

I am thinking that the reason this is happening is because is that there are probably places in the code where my developer has page.htm and Page.htm....Is this a problem, I don't think so...I just add the traffic together when I analyze the page...


DJKay

[qwerty]

Wait, don't tell me... The site wouldn't just happen to be hosted on a Windows server, would it? See, on an Apache server, if you had a file called page.htm, then links to Page.htm wouldn't bring up that page. If Page.htm didn't exist, you'd get a 404 error for that request. On IIS, you can have requests for page.htm, Page.htm, PAgE.htm, paGe.htm etc all bring up page.htm with a 200 response.

It's not a huge problem, but it's one of those little canonical things that you want to avoid, like making sure you're always linking to your home page with <a href="/"> instead of <a href="index.htm"> because it's possible that a search engine will, at least temporarily, treat the two URLs at which a page is available as two documents containing the same content. And if GA is treating them like two different pages, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if G is doing the same thing.

The longer the file name, the more different combinations of upper- and lower-case characters will bring up that file on a Windows server, so the trick is to make sure you give all of your files lower-case names and that you always link to them that way. Setting up redirects from every possible URL to the canonical one is just too much work in cases like this.

[DJKay]

Yes, its Microsoft IIS

Okay, aside from whacking my developer upside the head because I have told him about this more than few times in a few different ways.over the last 2 years..what do I do, I looked further down and saw I have problem with the "/" and the index.htm page

I am already using the canonical link element in other pages on the site, should I do it here for both these pages and their variations...so on the page that is page.htm have the code:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/page.com"/

and for index.htm:

link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/"/

[qwerty]

Yes, rel="canonical" should help, but I tend to think of it as more of a suggestion than an absolute order. Your best bet is to make sure you only link to a given page one way. Other sites may still link to your pages with URLs that could cause problems, but you've got less control over that.

[chrishirst]

Hey! Look I can get a self promo link drop in

http://www.modtalk.c...esign/uri-case/

[qwerty]

Setting up redirects from every possible URL to the canonical one is just too much work in cases like this.

I take that back, as long as you've got Chris around to give you advice on RegEx

[DJKay]

Thanks, are pages are not dynamically driven, so we will just put it at the top of every page. Thanks, DJKay