Tip: Mismatch URLS and Rankings

November 22, 2005

          

This is mainly for windows hosted sites. On a windows server a call to Index.html INDEX.html or index.html will all be accepted if the file is named index.html on the server. This however can mess with your search engine rankings. Google generates a checksum number for each url. So the url with Index.html is going to have a different checksum number as index.html just because of the uppercased I.

So why does this matter? Well the checksum number is the key to bringing back the correct PageRank in the Google bar. It's also a unique identifier, like an id number that is assigned to a url. Since I and i are completely different to a computer then the checksum numbers will also be different. This can hurt your search results because it opens the door to duplicate pages & content on your domain. That's a big no no for consistant across the board rankings.

For best results in the search engines always link to your pages the same way. Be consistant, if you uppercase the first letter do it in all the links. But to make it easy just keep everything lowercase. That is the most universal way by far amoungst webmasters.

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