Google lets you tell them which parameters to ignore

Thu 17 September 2009 17:16, Editors

Google added a new helpful feature to the Site Configuration Settings Sections of Google Webmaster Tools: Parameter Handling. With Parameter Handling you can tell Google which parameters to ignore when crawling your site.

In webmastercentral Google gives you a list of parameters they found in the website urls. It places a “Ignore” or “Don’t ignore” next to it so you can choose wether or not the suggested parameters should be ignored or not. You can also do suggestions for parameters which are not there. It's a nice feature, but the question arises why Google comes with it.

The feature should help with duplicate content issues. According to Searchengineland its something that already exists in several different tools. Searchengineland names some of them.

Vanessa Fox says:

"The two most common reasons for optional parameters and that this feature will work well for are:

Tracking codes used for analytics data (in this case, you may not want to implement a 301 redirect from the long version of the URL to the canonical one since you could lose the data)

Page layout changes, such as sort orders (in this case, the code on the page uses the parameter to change the layout of the page, but from a search engine perspective the content on each version is the same, just in a different order)"

It's not very clear why Google added this feature, so will we use it? You tell us.

<Twitter keeps Google out of mobi...

Google naming blogs in news, but...>

Comments (1)

- Robby
- [website]
I'm looking at using the parameter settings to ignore Omniture tracking url parameters. These change often with our campaigns and weaken our link strength. Perfect solution for us.

Wed 30 Sep 2009, 02:27

Comment

Why Yandex loses market share

Wed 8 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

0 comments

Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, has been losing market share for some time now. According to Liveinternet.ru, over the last year Yandex’s market sh...... read more

Vkontakte loses copyright battle

Tue 7 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

0 comments

Vkontakte, the most important social network in Russia, has recently lost a copyright case to Gala Music Group who claimed their rights for the content posted by Vk...... read more

Futubra... “Twitter for housewives”

Fri 3 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

1 comment

On January 16th Russian internet giant Mail.ru Group launched Futubra, a Russian-language microblogging service. Two weeks into the launch it had almost 50000 users an...... read more

‘Have Florida - Will Travel’

Wed 1 Feb 2012, Ramcy Simoons

0 comments

As Gallant Grand Old Party nominee Romney one upped or better put smacked the Gator daylights out of ole Gingrich or ‘G-rich’ for insiders (Comedy Central)...... read more