URL Parameters

Parameters in Search Console aren’t a directive, more of a hint to Google not to crawl these as frequently. Blocking URLs in Robots.txt is strong directive to say Google should not be looking at these pages e.g. if Google’s crawls are crashing your site.

Internal links with parameters does affect crawling and indexing, as Googlebot could potentially be crawling a lot of URLs that lead to the same content and aren’t as useful for search. The parameter handling tool is GSC can be used in these cases to let Google know these parameters can be ignored or you can avoid using internal tracking parameters.

Google tries to apply parameters set in the URL Parameters section of Search Console, like "Doesn’t affect page content". Google also spot checks these URLs, stripping away the parameter and crawling the simplified URL to check that this setting is correct.

Add self-referential rel canonicals to pages as it gives Google a clear indication of what page is to be indexed. Even if there is just one page, there may be different variations such as parameters – a rel canonical will clean these up.

URL Parameters make it easier for Google to understand the URL structure, and identify which URLs to ignore. Having parameters in the url path can make it harder for Google to understand.

URL parameters in URLs make it easier for Google to understand URLs for crawling and indexing. If you put everything into the path of the URL it can be harder for Google to crawl them properly.

If you add session IDs as a separate parameter instead of a semi-colon, then they can be managed more easily with the Search Console Parameter handling tool

You can use an Incognito window and GL parameter to view unpersonalised search results.

Parameter handling prevents URLs being crawled so is better than canonical tags for crawl efficiency.

Google learns which parameters are returning irrelevant pages partly based on canonicalised URLs.