Don't put Capital Letters in File Names

Using Capital Letters in Directory or File Names can Destroy Keyword Ranking

Domain names are not case sensitive so all hosting servers will automatically change the capital letters in domain names to lower case however, not on file names.

What Can't I Open my Web Page?

Directory or file names are case sensitive when hosted on some servers. Some people write their directory or file names in upper case or mixed case like this:

www.ExampleSite.com/FileNameGoesHere.html

Microsoft IIS servers can handle capitals in file names because they automatically change them to lower case, but not sites hosted on Apache servers.

When file names are spelled out with capital letters for websites hosted on Apache servers they produce 404 errors. Duplicate content penalties will result because search engines, and particularly Google, will think there are two different pages with the same content. Bad URL formatting results in reduced keyword ranking for all affected pages because you loose credit for the links that don't match your own formatting.

If your site is hosted on an Apache server and you have ever sent a URL similar to the one above to someone and they couldn't open the page, having capitals in the file name may be reason why they couldn't open the page.

You can 301 redirect those affected URLs or rewrite them via htaccess so they automatically change capital letters to lower case but any redirect will cause a delay of weeks or months for the search engines to sort out and thus further delay keyword ranking.

So it's better to never use capitals in file names, even if you are on a Microsoft IIS server, because if you ever move your site to an Apache server you'll have to rewrite all the URLs.

Why Don't my Images Open on my Web Page

The same is true for images. If you use capitals in file names of your images they may load ok on your computer but after you load them on the server they may not open. Change all image names to lower case and it should fix the problem. Make sure you change the image file name in the HTML also. No need to redirect the images in htaccess to the new location as mentioned above.