16 September 2009 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Google Parameter handling in Webmaster Tools

Google are forever looking for ways to improve their relationship with webmasters. Today, a budding bigmouthmedia SEO found a new feature within the Settings tab in Google Webmaster Tools named parameter handling.





Google's description of parameter handling is:

Quote: "Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially the same content. For example, http://www.example.com / dresses?sid=12395923 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com / dresses. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL. This can result in more efficient crawling and fewer duplicate URLs, while helping to ensure that the information you need is preserved. (Note: While Google takes suggestions into account, we don't guarantee that we'll follow them in every case.)"

From bigmouthmedia's first assessment, this tool allows webmasters to notify Googlebot of certain parameters it needs to be aware of in the crawling process. Google may then ignore or remove these parameters in order to display the most effective URL within the search results. Google may then treat these parameters differently.

Bigmouthmedia has seen a very similar tool within the Yahoo! Site Explorer named dynamic URLs. For once, we have seen a tool release initially by Yahoo! and the followed by Google - could this be a trend for the future?

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