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Lowercase - Uppercase letters create duplicate url

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10 years 7 months ago - 10 years 7 months ago #2634 by sakattack
Hello

I'm building a joomla 3 site and I'm using the corresponding version of datafeeds component. I noticed that, depending on the feed entries, some urls end up having some uppercase letters. If I manually go to the same url but with all the letters as lowercase then the same page is loaded again (instead of redirecting to the url with the uppercase letters or throwing a 404 error as it should), which ofcourse will be seen as duplicate content by the search engines.

Is there any way to fix this?

Thank you
Last edit: 10 years 7 months ago by sakattack.

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10 years 7 months ago #2636 by redactie
same goes for umlaut characters. the database-collation treats them as the same and therefor the component doesn't throw a 404 error. Thus technically the response is correct.

From the SEO point of view it is indeed an issue

I'm aware of the problem, however it not as simple as it looks to safely lowercase and transliterate all characters.

I have to look into the import parser, maybe their can be some improvements to get the data more consistent into the database.

or you can customize the router : affiliatefeeds.nl/pro-features/1155-cust...f-urls-svn-1617.html to lower-case all urls
The following user(s) said Thank You: sakattack

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10 years 7 months ago - 10 years 7 months ago #2637 by sakattack
Yes, I've already customized the router to make all urls lowercase, using mb_strtolower function, however if I manually enter the same url with any letter as uppercase then the same page is loaded, so the problem is there, and any competitor can black hat my ass by linking to multiple versions of the same page, changing only one letter at a time.

If I use sh404, it correctly 301 redirects to lowercase urls but it doesn't retain menu structure.

Maybe the solution is in .htaccess and httpd.conf to redirect to lowercase urls.
I'm also thinking of adding a rel=canonical to any url that has at least one uppercase letter in it (I prefer redirects though)
Last edit: 10 years 7 months ago by sakattack.

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