Why does MVC think multiple different addresses to the same page are SEO friendly?

Question

It has come to my attention that http://www.example.com/Home/About is considered completely different from http://www.example.com/homE/abouT, yet they are the same page and both have header response of 200.

These URL's should either be all lower or upper case and any variation should return a 301 and redirect to the all lower or upper case URL.

This may be ok with an “AboutUs” page but if you are per say a large store front with a large number of products this could kill any ranking you have or may attain in the future.

Wish MVC/ASP.NET can some kind of option to set strict URL’s in the routing engine.

Answer 1

Just use a canonical url with consistent capitalization and you shouldn't have any SEO issues even if people link to a differently cased version of your url.

Answer 2

that's what the canonical link is for.

and just because you can hard-type these urls into the search bar, it doesn't mean that search engines will index them like that. As long as you refer to your URLs in the same way, it won't be a problem.

Answer 3

Incidentally, even if you don't specify a canonical URL, Google is generally smart enough to figure out what's malicious vs. unintentional duplicate content. I'd imagine their algorithm is smart enough to know that two pages with the same content and only capitalisation changes in the URL aren't some attempt at gaming their crawler.

Answer 4

So rewrite your URLs to be all lower case.

http://ruslany.net/2009/04/10-url-rewriting-tips-and-tricks/

<rule name="Convert to lower case" stopProcessing="true">  
    <match url=".*[A-Z].*" ignoreCase="false" />  
    <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{R:0}}" redirectType="Permanent" />  
</rule>

Problem solved!