Goggle Parameter Handling

[motorcity]

Under Webmaster tools / site configuration / Settings; Parameter handling

 

"Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially the same content. For example, http://www.example.com/dresses?sid=12395923 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com/dresses. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL. This can result in more efficient crawling and fewer duplicate URLs, while helping to ensure that the information you need is preserved. (Note: While Google takes suggestions into account, we don't guarantee that we'll follow them in every case.)"

 

Haven't found much / any discussions on this subject.

 

One example;

Parameter + Action +

------------------------------------------------------

fl + Suggested: Don't Ignore + Edit

 

http://www.mysite.com/allproducts.php?fl=R&page=15

 

So I googled; mysite.com/*fl*

That returned just a couple of results from my site. We have thousands of products indexed on Google, and this may be a trivial issue but I'm curious. Anyone care to offer opinions, suggestions or best practices on parameter handling?

[♥mdtaylorlrim]

Google will index the domain and path, but not the parameters passed, unless you tell them to ignore them.

 

So, cPath set to not ignore will allow Google to index the entire URL, when that URL includes the parameter cPath, for example.

Set OScid to ignore. Most of the others to not ignore. Otherwise much of your store will not have links to internal pages.