Google Parameter Handling tool
The usefulness of Google Webmaster Tools has just gone up another notch. Google has introduced a feature that allows a webmaster to suggest which URL parameters it should ignore.
The usefulness of Google Webmaster Tools has just gone up another notch. Google has introduced a feature that allows a webmaster to suggest which URL parameters it should ignore. So far, there has been no official announcement of the tools inclusion from Google, so detailed information is scarce.
Dynamic URLs can cause many duplicate content problems for a website, but with the Parameter Handling tool, a webmaster can indicate up to 15 parameters that Google should ignore.
The tool also displays a list of parameters that Googlebot has found, with a suggested action alongside (either "Ignore" or "Don’t ignore") which can edited as needed.
The point of the tool (which is, as yet, untested) is that by excluding parameters such as session IDs and tracking codes, it will in theory make the crawling of a site more efficient. In other words, Google’s spiders will not spend time following URLs that are essentially duplicates, which should hopefully mean more time spent spidering your more valuable pages.
Another effect of this is that (again, in theory) "link juice" will not be split across multiple duplicate URLs but will be consolidated onto the correct URL, much like the canonical link element. The number of duplicate pages should be reduced as well.
Yahoo! offers similar functionality in its Site Explorer service, but obviously each such tool will only work with each specific search engine. What would be nice here is some form of standard that all search engines would honour (in this case, perhaps an extension to the robots.txt protocol).
It should also be noted that Google has included an interesting caveat on the tool’s page – just like the canonical link element, Google says that it will treat requests to ignore certain URL parameters as suggestions only.
Tags: canonical, Google, redirects, webmaster tools