When I designed my website, I was careful to design the URL extensions to be both search engine friendly and "helpful" in my search engine rankings by incorporating my keywords for that page into the extension. To be more specific, I run a website dedicated to unique lodging (B&Bs, Inns, etc) in California, so for my Calistoga city page reads www.calbeds.com/Calistoga.php (http://www.calbeds.com/Calistoga.php).

My concern is this...when you search 'Calistoga bed and breakfasts' on Google, it doesn't seem to be crediting my .../Calistoga.php extension because I capitalized it. Other listings that have ...calistoga... in the extension (non capitalized) seem to be receiving credit because Google puts their ...calistoga in bold (like below) in the keyword ranking.

www.bbexplorer.com/california/calistoga.html

My ...Calistoga.php is not in bold because it is capitalized. Yahoo seems OK with it capitalized, and bolds it all the same. MSN doesn't bold in the URLs. But Google seems to have issue with my having capitalized the first letter of the city name.

Thoughts? Opinions? Insights? Laughter?

Much obliged.

Seems to be something about Calistoga, it's in black and not underlined, G doesn't seem to recognise it as a place-name, but you should have known better than capitalising ;-)

The example about is that I gave in my original posting that is in black and is not underlined is just badly formatted.

Check out the actual Google results on 'Calistoga bed and breakfasts'. I'm listing #10. The ones all above me with ...calistoga... in their extensions are in bold, mine with ...Calisotoga... is not.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=calistoga+bed+and+breakfasts

I wish I HAD known not to capitalize (obviously). Yahoo doesn't care, but Google apparently does.

Any more thoughts from people?

First, to say that I'm not a server expert, but I have encountered this problem. Caps and lc are treated in unix as different characters.

On one client site that was inconsistent about capitalization in a url, we fixed it with mod_rewrite. When our server served up the same page, the problem was fixed on Google.

There's also an Apache module called mod_speling that addresses this problem. Originally, it was limited just to capitalization. In later Apache versions, it also corrects spellings, a side effect you may or may not want. I don't know how configurable the module is. Would love to hear from someone who knows.