Google will retire the URL parameters tool in Search Console next month, the company confirmed in today’s announcement.
Current users of the tool do not need to take any action, Google said.
This means you no longer need the ability to specify URL parameters on your site.
The URL Parameters Tool enables people to specify how certain parameters affect the content on their website.
Now, Google’s crawler will learn how to handle URL parameters automatically.
In other words, the URL parameter tool is no longer needed.
Gary Illyes of Google’s Search Relationships team explained that the tool was introduced more than a decade ago as a solution for a “wilderer” period in web history.
“When the URL parameter tool was introduced in 2009 in Webmaster Tools, the predecessor of Search Console, the internet was a wilder place than it is today. SessionID parameters were very common, CMSs had difficulty organizing parameters, and browsers frequently broke links.”
Here’s an example of what the tool looked like when it launched in 2009:
Ultimately, Google learned which parameters worked and which didn’t.
Apparently, currently only 1% of the parameter configuration specified in the URL parameter tool is useful for crawling.
Given how much the value of the tool has declined over the years, Google will officially deprecate it next month.
If you need more control over how Google handles URL parameters on your site, you can always use robots.txt rules.
Google also reminded people that hreflang can be used to specify language variants of website content.
resource: Google Search Center Blog
Featured Image: YueStock/Shutterstock
