Forum Discussion
URLs in sitemap automatically changed to lower case
I am constrained by Bing webmaster which automatically changes all url writing to lowercase in the sitemap (in the .xml file I have written it correctly.
this happens to all my pages that use the zh-Hans (Chinese simplified) and also zh-Hant (Chinese traditional) language versions.
for example: mysite.com/zh-Hans/database/profile/2001/ Bing changes it to mysite.com/zh-hans/database/profile/2001/
in the end the index status of all these pages becomes canonicalized.
does anyone have a way to overcome this?
It looks like Bing is automatically converting URLs to lowercase, which can cause indexing issues. A few things you can try:
1. 301 Redirects - Redirect the lowercase URLs to the correct mixed-case versions.
2. Canonical Tags - Add <link rel="canonical" href="your-correct-url"> in the page <head> to signal the right version.
3. Server Config - If your server is case-sensitive, set up rules to handle URL case properly.
Unfortunately, Bing may still force lowercase, so relying on Google's indexing or adjusting your site structure might be necessary.
Hi Kristina, thanks for your ideas.
- Yeah I guess I'll end up with redirecting all pages to mixed-case version.
- For canonical tags, I've tried that and my pages being canonicalized to the correct version, don't think this method would help me through indexing issue, feels like my sitemap doesn't have any impact at all with this situation.
- I believe nothing wrong with my server configuration.
Agreed, relying on Bing's indexing might be one of the solution, but since I have a lot of pages needs to be indexed I can't just sit down here waiting for too long 😢
That makes sense....redirecting all pages to the mixed-case version should help maintain consistency. Regarding canonical tags, it's good that they're pointing to the correct version, but as you said, they might not be enough to solve the indexing issue on their own.
If your sitemap isn't having an impact, have you tried submitting individual URLs via Bing Webmaster Tools to see if that speeds up the process? Also 😚😃 checking for any crawl budget limitations or indexing restrictions in your robots.txt and meta tags might be worth a look.🙃
