Google’s John Mueller answered a question about canonicals, expressing his opinion that “hope” shouldn’t be a part of your SEO strategy with regard to canonicals. The implication is that hoping Google will figure it out on its own misses the point of what SEO is about.
Canonicals And Case Sensitivity
Rel=canonical is an HTML tag that enables a publisher or SEO to tell Google what their preferred URL is. For example, it’s useful for suggesting the best URL when there are multiple URLs with the same or similar content. Google isn’t obligated to obey the rel=canonical declaration, it’s treated as a strong hint.
Someone on Reddit was in the situation where a website has category names that they begin with a capitalized letter but the canonical tag contains a lowercase version. There is currently a redirect from the lowercase version to the uppercase.
They’re currently not seeing any negative impact from this state of the website and were asking if it’s okay to leave it as-is because it hasn’t affected search visibility.
The person asking the question wrote:
“…I’m running into something annoying on our blog and could use a sanity check before I push dev too hard to fix it. It’s been an issue for a month, after a redesign was launched.
All of our URLs resolve in this format: /site/Topic/topic-title/
…but the canonical tag uses a lowercase topic, like: /site/topic/topic-title/
So the canonical doesn’t exactly match the actual URL’s case. Lowercase topic 301 redirects to the correct, uppercase version.
I know that mismatched canonicals can send mixed signals to Google.
Dev is asking, “Are you seeing any real impact from this?” and technically, the answer is no — but I still think it’s worth fixing to follow best practices.”
If It Works Don’t Fix It?
This is an interesting case because in many things related to SEO if something’s working there’s little point trying to fix a small detail for fear of triggering a negative response. Relying on Google to figure things out is another fallback.
Google’s John Mueller has a different opinion. He responded:
“URL path, filename, and query parameters are case-sensitive, the hostname / domain name aren’t. Case-sensitivity matters for canonicalization, so it’s a good idea to be consistent there. If it serves the same content, it’ll probably be seen as a duplicate and folded together, but “hope” should not be a part of an SEO strategy.
Case-sensitivity in URLs also matters for robots.txt.”
Takeaway
I know that in highly competitive niches the SEO is on a generally flawless level. If there’s something to improve it gets improved. And there’s a good reason for that. Someone at one of the search engines once told me that anything you can do to make it easier for the crawlers is a win. They advised me to make sites easy to crawl and content easy to understand. That advice is still useful, it follows with Mueller’s advice to not “hope” that Google figures things out, implying that it’s best to make sure they do work out.
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