New Update in Google Webmaster Tools: Submit URL Parameters to Ignore

I think this is definitely a good initiative by Google, allowing the webmasters to let the Googlebot know which URL parameters to ignore while crawling or indexing the site web pages.

1. Log in to your Google Webmaster tools account
2. Click on the ‘Site Configuration’ link on the left and then on ‘Settings’
3. At the bottom you will find ‘Parameter Handling’ to adjust the parameter settings.

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/product?pid=123 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com/product. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL.

Also, Google lists the parameters they have identified in the URLs of your site and suggests if the parameters are vague for them. You can confirm your choice to ignore or not to ignore. You can also add parameters that Googlebot was unable to identify and list them.

The reasons why I find this useful are:

1. This will really help Google in identifying the duplicate content pages and help them in proper indexing with fewer duplicate URLs.
2. This can result in more efficient crawling of Googlebot.
3. Googlebot can crawl more pages and index them, as the crawler efficiency is increased.
4. This can reduce the PageRank dilution as external website may be linking to various versions of your URLs and this will help Google understand that all these pages are same. Thus, providing the proper PageRank credit to the page.
5. Simple way to indicate the parameters to ignore or consider, instead of using the canonical option.

Yahoo Site Explorer has a similar feature and Bing is yet to include this. If you want to opt this method then you will be ignoring Bing and other search engines which do have the parameter suggestion option.

Related posts: Duplicate Content Issues and Probable Solutions