Should I do it?

[Norman]

Excuse me for the title, but I realy don’t know how I could describe this question I’m going to ask you.

Now I have site.com/community/ and it is working as normal. But, if I go at site.com/Community I get a 404 page. Should I consider to redirect “Community” to “community”? I mean, does it have any influence in SEO or whatever?
Let’s say I’d like to redirect, should I go via htaccess?

Thanks in advance!

[cpradio]

Sort of depends. Do you know how many people are going to /Community? Access logs will indicate this. Or more importantly, why? Are people putting links to it somewhere?

Take sitepoint, for example, we don’t do that redirect, probably wouldn’t even consider it. Even with sitepoint.com /JavaScript doesn’t redirect to /javascript. With that said, I would argue, it would provide little value to you. Plus, what if someone did /COmmunity or /cOmmunity, how many redirects do you want?

[Norman]

Thank you, cpradio. You perfectly described the situation and provided with some great examples, at least for my specific case. The situation where it happened is pretty simple. I was on chat and I typed “hey, you find me here: site.com/Community/” using the capital letter, even if I know that it’s /community/ all with underscores. So it was primary one of my mistakes. So I gently asked to know if this was a recognized thing with an existent solution or not (also on other websites).

Thank you again for your reply, cpradio.

[jeffreylees]

I think @cpradio hit the nail on the head with “probably unnecessary”.

if, for whatever reasons, you feel that it’s necessary, or you see lots of traffic to a couple of mistyped or misreadable paths, I can’t see that there’d be a lot of harm in adding a couple of 301 redirects in your .htaccess.

But I doubt it’d be worth your while in most cases.

[Mittineague]

I think it would be a good idea to have a single rule for all Not Founds

Instead of showing the default error message, better to show the home page, a sitemap page, a search this site page etc.

You should still return the proper HTTP headers for the bad URL, but showing visitors something, anything, other than an error screen IMHO can’t be a bad idea

[Norman]

Thank you guys for your replies.

@Mittineague I actually have a custom 404 page for “not found” errors. In this case I think that I can leave it as it is. If someone just mistype the URL they will see the custom 404 page which contains all the relevant URLs of the website plus a search box.