October 10, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Google have come up with a brand new feature that should have SEO professionals jumping for joy… Or at least smiling. It’s called Parameter Control, and it allows you to specify as many as fifteen separate URL parameters for the Google search bots to ignore as they crawl your site.
The system works like this, you set the parameters that Google should ignore from webmaster tools under the site configuration tab. Google will then, in theory, disregard those parameters when crawling. I say in theory, because Google will take these settings as suggestions rather than orders and so may decide not to do exactly what you suggest, though any guidance you can give as to how a site should be crawled is good, right?
If the new system takes off, it should lead to increased simplicity in the process of determining rank, making Google’s life easier. It should also lead to fewer headaches for SEOs when chasing rank. Used correctly, it’ll increase crawl efficiency, give you better, simpler display URLs and most importantly of all it’ll be an excellent tool for controlling duplicate content. More about that tomorrow.
Related posts:
- Using Google Parameter Controls to control Duplicate Content
- How to increase your crawl rate (Part two)
- Enhancement due for Facebook Query suggestion feature
- How to increse your crawl rate (Part one)
- Page Segmentation Part 3: The potential Advantages for Search Engines
- Google Image Search brings classic photography online
