Google to Drop URL Parameter Tool - SEO Best Practices?

[robzilla]

Recently Google announced it's sunsetting the URL Parameter Tool in Search Console:

Over the years, Google became much better at guessing which parameters are useful on a site and which are —plainly put— useless. In fact, only about 1% of the parameter configurations currently specified in the URL Parameters tool are useful for crawling. Due to the low value of the tool both for Google and Search Console users, we're deprecating the URL Parameters tool in 1 month.

Going forward you don't need to do anything to specify the function of URL parameters on your site, Google's crawlers will learn how to deal with URL parameters automatically.

[developers.google.com...]

I'm curious to know how everyone here is handling their parameterized URLs from an SEO perspective. For example, do you let the bots just roam freely, potentially crawling millions of low-value URLs (category filters, etc), or do you reign them in somehow?

I recently discovered I was mistakenly using rel=canonical to point to the main (unfiltered) category pages. Wrong tool for the job, of course, since these parameters (unlike tracking parameters, for example) actually changed the content on the page.

[Brett_Tabke]

>I'm curious to know how everyone here is handling their parameterized URLs

Well, since something like 40% of the web runs wordpress now, the problem took care of itself. The rest of us, went to htaccess rules (you are soaking it in now) to rewrite to static content.

[No5needinput]

I use rewrite to strip query strings and allow specific onsite URI's

# Strip query strings

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !=""
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blah/admin.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L]

[lucy24]

Psst!

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blah/admin
RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L]

for a savings of seven bytes :)

[koan]

I add a canonical tag whenever possible, this way, if useless parameters are added to my pages by external links, Google still know what should be the real page.