: Bingbot trying to access lower case urls when i am using a mixture of uppercase and lowercase I have a website (dynamic real estate website) that has been up for nearly a year, all of a

@Merenda212

Stephen Ostermiller gave me the answer to proceed with testing and to implement the following in my .htaccess

RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine

Redirect 301 /houses-for-sale-in-suburb-state-3345.php example.com/Houses-for-sale-in-Suburb-STATE-3345.php


I wrote a redirect for every single page that had CAPS in the URL, except for the dynamically created URL's, which are driven by RewriteRules in the .htaccess & put the Redirects above the RewriteRules

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@Megan663

When I worked for TripAdvisor, we saw this problem all the time. TripAdvisor has mixed case URLs like:
www.tripadvisor.com/Hotels-g60763-New_York_City_New_York-Hotels.html

Many crawlers including BingBot would try to lower case the entire URL before fetching it. To fix the issue we made sure that all lowercase URLs would redirect to the mixed case version. So the following gives a 301 redirect:
www.tripadvisor.com/hotels-g60763-new_york_city_new_york-hotels.html

We used the ID in the URL to figure out the correct URL and redirect. It looks like you have a numeric id in your URL that you could use as well.

Because of this experience, I recommend that the canonical version of URLs always be all lowercase. I don't recommend using mixed case URLs because there are so many badly programmed crawlers.

StackExchange does something similar. If you request a butchered URL with the id still intact, you will get a redirect to the correct thing. You can test this by fetching the following URL for this question:
webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/100613/BINGBOT-IS-DUMB

I also recommend that numeric ids go near the front of the URL because of truncation issues. You can correct for

/Hotels-g60763-New_Yor...


but not as easily for:

/Houses-for-sale-in-Su...

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