I have seen many websites supporting multiple forms of the same URL. For example consider
www.example.com/question1/
ORwww.example.com/Question1/
ORwww.example.com/QUESTION1/
etc.
all lead to one page with say
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/question1/" >
or a 301 redirect to www.example.com/question1/
.
Does this affect the page rank anyhow or its just for seemless user experience or there is some other reason behind this?
Infact even stackoverflow/stackexchange does this. No matter what the text after the id of the question in URL they redirect you to the correct question!