Capital letter vs Non-capital letter?

[Smuck]

Does a capital letter in the url have an effect on inbound linking? For instance, using the blogs as an example see here:

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/blogs/ is here.

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/Blogs/ ('B' is capitalized) is here.

It appears the capital letter does effect inbound linking numbers, but am I missing something?

[Saodavi]

Some opertaing systems (Unix) are case sensitive. ChaNgIng CasE might affect people who try to link to your blog or type it in from memory. Plus, if you are on a non-case-sensitive platform (Windows) and later move to a different server platform, suddenly all those case changes will be significant.

So, I guess I haven't answered your question. But as a general rule, I try to use lower case for everything for technical/practical reasons. For SEO, I'm not sure if it matters.

[Smuck]

I understand what you are saying Saodavi, however, maybe I am not asking the right question. How's this:

Let's say the REW blogs (for example) url has 100 links pointing to it. Will Google see 100 links pointing to both filenames: http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/blogs/ AND
http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/Blogs/?

Or, as mentioned in the first post, is Google only 'seeing' 100 links to the little b url?

[Saodavi]

So, are you concerned that of your 100 links: 75 might link as "Blogs" and 25 might link as "blogs"? Thus you would be concerned that Google would be treating them as separate links. Basically, under this scenario you're not getting 100% credit for your back links ... right?

I'm not sure I know the answer to your question. However, the fact that on some operating systems, you could theoretically have a /blogs and a /Blogs and a /BLOGS and a /BlOgs all on the same system, each with entirely unique and unrelated content because each unique spelling is a separate folder due to the case-sensitivity of the underlying OS.

Therefore it would seem that Google, not knowing anything about your underlying OS (or does it?), would HAVE to treat differently-spelled URLs as unique occurrences ... unless G goes through the effort to see if they both contain the exact same content ... in which case they'd be the same folder on the server. Hopefully they wouldn't be hitting you with a duplicate content penalty.

I do realize that I'm not really answering your question ... I'm just kind of talking it through to see all the issues. I'm not sure if anyone knows the answer since the exact algorithms G uses are top secret. I also don't know if anyone at G has addressed this in particular. It's an interesting question.

EDIT: I guess I'm saying Google WILL "see" both the big "B" and the small "b" if that's how the link is typed. They have to see them and treat them as unique ... at least until they follow the link and get to the content. The real question is how Google evaluates different url's pointing to the same content. Am I getting it right?

[jkmiller]

I've wondered this myself. I actually created capitals as my links for example:

Panama City Condos
http://www.longbeachsales.com/Panama...ndominiums.php

Beacause I've seen more results with capitals in Google. Am I being paranoid or what?

[Bigtoe]

When in doubt be consistent.

[36towns]

Does a capital letter in the url have an effect on inbound linking?

No it doesn't.

Example 1

Example 2

[Smuck]

No it doesn't.

Example 1 Example 2

See post #1 of this thread!

[SEO adler]

It absolutely does matter. There were two inconsistent links in my site, one pointing to /Blogs/ the other to /blogs/. Google did not index both of them, but people linked to both instances. In my Google webmaster account, I saw 2 distinct links. /Blogs/ had 600 external links and /blogs/ had 400. When I typed in the URL, both of them had different PR and it split all my backlinks. I had to put in a 301 redirect to the uncapitalized version to pass along the link value.