Spring cleaning: the URL Parameters tool

March 28, 2022

On Monday, March 28, 2022, Google will be deprecating the URL Parameters tool in Search Console. This tool was launched in 2009 in Webmaster Tools and allowed site owners to specify how certain parameters affected the content on their site. Over the years, Google has become much better at guessing which parameters are useful on a site and which are not, and as a result, only about 1% of the parameter configurations currently specified in the URL Parameters tool are actually useful for crawling. Therefore, Google has decided to remove this tool from Search Console in one month.

Google has announced that going forward, there is no need to do anything to specify the function of URL parameters on your website. The search engine's crawlers will automatically learn how to deal with them.

However, if you need more control over URL parameters, you can use robots.txt rules or hreflang to specify language variations of content.

You can catch Google's search team on Twitter if you have questions or comments.

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