SEO – Google Webmaster now Allows more control over Duplicate Content Issues!

A lot of times, Google may penalize your website because your URLs have been linked with multiple URL parameters such as &tracking=12345.

Google has recently introduced “Parameter Handling” to their Google Webmaster dashboard, now you can easily block out those unwanted parameters so your website doesn’t get penalized without having to worry about using parameters freely.

I think this will help webmasters like you and me control duplicate content better where they are not really duplicate content.

Let’s take our old example of a site selling Swedish fish. Imagine that your preferred version of the URL and its content looks like this:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

However, you may also serve the same content on different URLs depending on how the user navigates around your site, or your content management system may embed parameters such as sessionid:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

With the “Parameter Handling” setting, you can now provide suggestions to our crawler to ignore the parameters category, trackingid, and sessionid. If we take your suggestion into account, the net result will be a more efficient crawl of your site, and fewer duplicate URLs.