At Loud Interactive, we observe that URLs are sometimes funneled into another internal URL for the sole purpose of changing character case, usually modifying upper case letters to lower case ones.
Why is this important?
When URLs undergo a redirection, signified by 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) status codes, it indicates a change in the page’s location, redirecting visitors to a new destination. Such redirections, although common due to regular content updates and restructuring, negatively impact user experience and add complexity for search engines during crawling operations.
Each redirection introduces an additional step, thereby delaying access to the content and providing a suboptimal signal to users, while imposing extra workload on search engines to locate the content.
We advise limiting redirections for internal URLs, which can be efficiently managed to provide a seamless user experience.
What does the Optimization check?
The Optimization will activate for any internal URL that responds with a 3XX HTTP status code and where the destination URL is a case variation of the original URL.
Examples that trigger this Optimization:
Take for example the URL:
This Optimization would activate if this URL returned a 3XX HTTP response redirecting to a lower-case variant, shown as follows:
HTTP/... 301 Moved Permanently...Location: https://example.com/page/
Another example is the URL:
This would similarly trigger the Optimization if the server directs to a lower-case version, like this:
HTTP/... 301 Moved Permanently...Location: https://example.com/page/
This is applicable to other 3XX HTTP responses as well.
How do you resolve this issue?
The origin of this issue typically lies in server configurations that prefer lower-case URLs, redirecting any upper-case URLs to their lower-case counterparts in an attempt to avert content duplication. Inconsistent internal linking practices exacerbate this condition.
The remedy involves mapping out all links that point to the redirected URLs and updating their href attributes to link directly to the appropriate URLs.
As a part of Loud Interactive’s due diligence, identify which links require correction due to integration of incorrect case URLs in the content. Also, discern instances where the incorrect links are embedded within the website’s template, and cooperate with developers to amend these. A single template fix can simultaneously address numerous redirection issues.