The general idea is that Search Engines don’t pay attention to capitalization. Search engine results will be the same no matter how you capitalize things. Is this really true? Some may disagree for a few reasons.

Before going into the details of this, I’d like to say that anyone who says that capitalization doesn’t matter is correct. The people who say that it does matter aren’t entirely incorrect, but, if you want to go by official text, they are wrong. Google states that capitalization has no effect on their SERPs on a page of their FAQ:

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

Although Google states this, you can still see different results when using different capitalization. Let’s look at a few examples:

1. Results 1 – 10 of about 1,560,000 for dave grohl.
2. Results 1 – 10 of about 1,560,000 for Dave Grohl.
3. Results 1 – 10 of about 1,540,000 for DaVe GrohL.
4. Results 1 – 10 of about 1,540,000 for DAVE GROHL.

As you can see, there are slight differences in the volumes of search results. This happens because there are differences in the cached searches for each capitalization.

For the top results, the SERPs are all the same. You won’t begin to see differerences until you get past the 10th page (it really depends on the keyword and the time that you are making the search).

So, does capitalization really matter? It’s hard to decide. A perfect search engine would pay no attention to capitalization. The world isn’t perfect though. Since Google has to have many servers to store data, things aren’t always in-sync. For this reason, capitalization does affect search engine results, but only after a certain point. Personally, I don’t usually look for results past the point where capitalization matters. I bet that most people don’t, so it would be more accurate to say that capitalization doesn’t matter.

Tags: Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines and Capitalization