Plugin searches should force to lowercase

[jonoaldersonwp]

Plugin searches like ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/Cats/ support mixed-case URLs.

The search form submission/handling process should return a lowercase URL, and, direct requests to mixed-cased URLs here should be forced to lowercase via a 301 redirect.

[dd32]

Changing this would be of detriment to end-users, and complicated for non-ascii languages

[jonoaldersonwp]

If you're concerned about the input box and H1 contents, then we could add some additional complexity to the ticket to address - we could de-couple the search query and how it's (re)presented to the user from the slug; maintaining the former, and forcing the latter to lowercase.

[edo888]

The search pages have "noindex,follow", does it really matter in terms of SEO or this is just for esthetics?

Also, why is this a high priority task? Which criterion is used to set a priority in the meta trac?

Thanks!

[jonoaldersonwp]

Yes, it matters. We have millions of pages on a site which is still profoundly unhealthy. We have hundreds of thousands of URLs which Google hasn't even evaluated yet, because crawling the site is so resource-intensive, and so poorly optimized. Every single individual URL which we can de-duplicate and bring up to something resembling best practice claws back crawl budget and resource for the URLs which matter.

[edo888]

Good point, thanks!