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When building an new website with same URL structure: if the old website has URLs appearing as e.g. www.example.com/ServicePage, what, if any, effect will changing the URLs to www.example.com/servicepage have on the site's SEO, given that there are probably links pointing to the existing URLs with the first format?

I would not have thought any, since when typing the second format into the browser, it resolves to the first format with no apparent redirection. But I want to be clear before doing anything.

Thank you for the advice.

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    Character case has nothing to do with search performance. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Nov 24, 2016 at 23:10
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    URLs are case-sensitive. So if you want to have URLs lowercase, there is no problem for SEO. typing the second format into the browser, it resolves to the first format with no apparent redirection - browsers do not convert Uppercase urls to lowercase unless it is domain-name. May be your application does this. So I dont know how your old urls are being redirected to lowercase. It will be safe if you do 301 redirection from old urls to new if the site is having backlinks to the first format and you are not sure about how it resolves to lower case.
    – Suri Babu
    Nov 25, 2016 at 10:31

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Browsers don’t convert /servicepage to /ServicePage unless you tell them to (e.g., with a server-side redirect). The URL path is case-sensitive, so these are different resources, and they could serve different documents (see example).

Which one to use typically doesn’t matter for SEO. What is important is that you use one version. When you change it, you should redirect from the old to the new one (with 301).

(As search engines have to index your pages again when you redirect, you might notice some ranking changes, but after some time everything should be the same again.)

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  • Hello again, I'm sorry for the 2 week long reply! We're about to launch the new site with the 301 redirects from the lower to upper case URLs... I'm just a little nervous that it might have an adverse effect overall on rankings. But you're quite sure it won't? I suppose it's no different than making any other URL changes for a new site, which would require the same method, right...
    – zakgottlieb
    Dec 8, 2016 at 19:31
  • @zakgottlieb: Yes, it’s like any other URL change -- and those always can have an effect on the ranking. But if only the URL is changed (no content changes, apart from updated hyperlinks), the chance is higher that nothing bad happens. But you can of course never know for sure.
    – unor
    Dec 8, 2016 at 19:41
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Upper and Lowercase characters in your URL really don't make a difference in regards to Search Engine Optimization.

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