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

SEO of Dynamic Pages

Here are some things to keep in mind when optimizing dynamic pages:

1. Dynamic URLs are definitely search engine friendly.
2. If possible specify the title tag. Or use a CMS which has this option. Title tag is the most important on-page SEO factor. Most CMS's use the site name as the default title tag. The worst ones use it as the title for all pages, less worse ones use it in the form " ". Ideally, you want the page title first. And make sure that the title of that content page is well optimized for the keywords you're trying to target.
3. Specify meta tags. This is not so important for SEO, but can make a difference to your click-throughs from the SERPs (search engine results pages) - particularly the meta description. Ideally, you can specify the content for the meta description when you're creating content. Same goes for the meta keywords, but this is very minor. Major search engines don't really care anymore.
4. Proper use of heading tags. Make sure that you use h1 tag for the page heading, and use subheadings (h2 tag, etc) for sub-headers in the content. These are relatively well weighted SEO factors. If you're using a WYSIWYG editor in the CMS, make sure that it uses tags as opposed to just changing the font size.
5. Clean code. I've seen so many dynamic sites that are messily coded. Ideally, the outputted HTML code is as clean as possible and the actual content appears relatively close to the top of the HTML. Using CSS-based, non-table layouts will make a difference here as well.
6. With regards to listing all the dynamic links on a static page, that's not really necessary, though it's a still a good idea to have a sitemap - both HTML and XML.