Forum

[bigarsenalbear]

Hey guys and girls,

I searched the forum for this before deciding to post but only found one fairly relevant answer. So I thought I'd ask it myself again.

Does Google distinguish upper from lower-case?

Actually, that's a very vague way of putting it. Let me make it specific.

Suppose you use the Google keyword tool and find a keyword you want to target (because it has good search volume, low competition, whatever). Suppose it's a product name keyword and has the structure

product name

Now suppose you go and build your site but you optimize everything for

Product name

In other words, the keyword tool showed you product name (with a lower-case "p") but in your title tags and on your pages you used Product name (with an upper-case "P").

Does this matter? Will Google crawl your site and think: "Not relevant."

Or at least: "not quite as relevant as if it'd been product name with a lower-case!"

Best

Adam

 

[essexboyracer]

perhaps, but as far as I know google indexes domain names and these are case insensitive unless someone knows different... I would suggest good grammar is the order of the day here. What that translates into title tags grammar I don't know - I was crap at English in school.

 

[bigarsenalbear]

Thanks for posting essexboyracer (sorry - don't know your real name!)

I do try to make sure the grammar is correct for users' sake!

 

[newstart]

I agree with essexboyracer. I have found no evidence indicating that Google, Bing or Yahoo's search results are case sensitive. Too many people are in a rush when they begin searches. Case sensitivity would skew the results produced by the search making them unreliable.

 

[bigarsenalbear]

Thanks newstart - seems most people believe Google is case insensitive so I'll just act as if that's the case!

 

[michellerana]

Keywords are matched without regard to upper-case or lower-case letters.

For example, you don't need to enter 'real estate' and 'Real Estate' as keywords; just 'real estate' will cover both.

Hope that helps! :)

 

[bigarsenalbear]

Thank you for pointing that out. Case closed I think!

 

[Aarondsouzaa]

Yes of course it gives the different result even when you change the space in your keyword search...

 

[lizatailor23]

In my experience Google will treat the upper case and lower case URL's as two different URLs.

It is possible to have an upper case URL with PR and the lower case equivalent to have no PR. The opposite scenario is also possible. It just seems to depend upon what case your links are in.

 

[newstart]

I have not found that to be the case. I have found there is a difference between URL's that include: www.domainname.com & domainname.com.

However, I have not found there to be a difference between: www.DomainName.com & www.domainname.com or its counterpart DomainName.com & domainname.com.

I have checked several of my websites. I cannot find any case sensitive URL's.

Margene Smith

 

[jmpruitt]

with the base URL it will always show in lowercase, however, subdirectories can be separated by caps or no caps

so you could have yoursite.com/Articles and yoursite.com/articles, and they would be counted as two different urls.