First off, I do not recommend doing this. You may have undesireable effects such as images that use upper and lower case names all of a sudden no longer displaying because they must be lower case to work.

The general concensus among members of the SEO community seem to be that there is really no reason to do this. There is little to no SEO benefit. The user experience really is not effected by this. Nevertheless, as a systems administrator, you may be asked to make this happen – just in case there is a benefit.

My solution here works on the CentOS Linux operating system. I have not tested it elsewhere. It assumes mod_rewrite is installed which by default it is.

You cannot do this from the .htaccess file. It can only be done by making a change in the httpd.conf file. At that, it is an entry in the host section for each individual site on your server.

Here is the change.


<VirtualHost an_ip_address:80>
  A bunch of virtual host information needed for the site.

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower
  RewriteCond $1 [A-Z]
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /${lowercase:$1} [R=301,L]

</VirtualHost>

I found the solution in this discussion thread after striking out from others – http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread46647.html