Google’s Parameter Handling Tool: Great Tool to Reduce Duplicate Content Issue
Dynamic web sites have many advantages. Dynamic web sites can send and receive and store data between the web page and the database. This data can be useful information about your products, members or your contents. Beside many advantages, dynamic web sites have some issues and dynamically generated pages’ URLs is one of the major issues which Search Engine Optimizers face while optimizing a dynamic web site. The disadvantage of these URLs containing many parameters, is that they confuse search engine bots and effect site indexing.
Many dynamic web sites now use URL rewriting to hide ugly looking long URLs to rewrite them to short search engine friendly URLs. But there are thousands of web sites still running without URL rewriting. In some cases the parameters used in URLs cause problems for search engine bots. Session IDs, other sorting parameters and dynamically generated calendar with no data and time restrictions may generate huge amount of duplicate pages. SE bots encounter an extremely high number of URLs from the web sites which causes search engine bots to crawl a large number of different URLs pointing to same page. This not only effects the proper indexing of web site by major search engines but the excessive consumption of bandwidth by search engine bots.
This problem can be handled in different ways and one of the available solutions is the URL rewriting but fortunately Google has also offered a solution to this important problem. You may handle this dynamic URL issue by using Parameter Handling Tool. It is very easy to use tool available under Google Web Master Tools.
In order to use Google’s Parameter Handling Tool, you will have to login to your Google Web Master Tools account. From your GWT dashboard, click the site you want and under Site Configuration click setting. Now click Parameter Handling Tab from top menu. For each parameter there are three options available:
- Ignore
- Don’t Ignore
- Let Google decide
You should select “Ignore” for all your problematic parameters. If a parameter is not listed on this page, it means that Google has not detected it during crawling of your web site. There is an option available here to add any parameter which you want Google to ignore. Remember this tool handles parameter for Googlebot only, for other search engines you need to adopt other techniques.
