Rankelle

URL contains capital letters

The path of this URL has upper-case letters. Most servers treat /About and /about as different pages, so one address ends up duplicated or broken depending on how it was typed.

How to fix it

Use lower-case URLs throughout, and redirect the upper-case form to the lower-case one.

When it is not a problem

A platform that consistently generates one casing and redirects the other is safe. The risk is the URL that exists in both forms and answers on both.

How Rankelle handles it

  • SeverityInformational. Often correct as it stands, and reported so you can see the pattern rather than so you can clear it.
  • DetectionDetected on a single page while crawling it, then grouped with the other pages under the same URL pattern.
  • GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question. Causes are ranked by the impressions behind their pages.
  • LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
  • VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing — all four verdicts reach the report.

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