Case Matters

If, like me, you are used to working on a Windows environment for hosting your websites, then there's a chance that (like me...) you don't really pay too much attention to the correct case for file names. Why should you - they don't make any difference?

For example, page.html and PaGe.HtMl are both the same on Windows 2003.

But not on Unix!

If you try to access Page.html by typing page.html, it won't work on Unix.

What does that matter to us Windows users - surely it's irrelevant.

I've just had to move a customer's website to a Unix server because he wanted to use a new package on the site and it's not compatible with Windows. I started moving pages over and came across some pages where the case of the links didn't match the actual page names. I corrected the links, reviewed the pages and to my horror noticed the once PR3 pages were suddenly grey barred!

This was easily solved - I just had to change the page names (and revert the links) so that the case matched what Google had cached and immediately the PRs were reinstated.

So this leads me to draw an interesting conclusion. If your website is hosted on Windows and you aren't consistent with the case of page names, then you could have some links to page.html, others to Page.html etc. Well Google is going to see these as 2 separate pages and penalise one for being duplicate content, whilst only giving the other some of the internal linking benefit it should have.

If you are on Windows, make sure that you still follow Unix file naming!