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The other day we asked you if Google should drop the URL parameter tool because as you know, if used incorrectly, it can do some serious damage to your site. So some SEOs are like, sure - drop it, just give us reporting on what would happen if you used the tool but don't actually let the tool do anything.
Alan Bleiweiss said on Twitter "don't allow them to DO anything with it anymore. Kill off the ability to set the "what to do". Just let me see this data."
Right - don't allow them to DO anything with it anymore. Kill off the ability to set the "what to do". Just let me see this data. pic.twitter.com/rA90tepqTR
— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) May 8, 2020
Joost said put it in the API so they can surface it in Yoast:
Also, please put this in the API.
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) May 8, 2020
He also said he sees this as a common issue SEOs run into:
Yeah taking this feature away helps people like us too.
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) May 8, 2020
We get support requests for sites that have issues, but then sometimes their GSC settings are the problem and we can’t easily see those from the outside...
So reporting on it versus acting on it might be a good solution?
Since I can't possibly crawl a multi-million page site in its entirety, this is one of the best sources for me identifying mass scale wasted crawl, and from there, identify mass scale indexing from within that I can then have the client address.
— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) May 8, 2020
Want to know how serious it can get? Thanks to the parameter report, I helped this client remove several million pages from the Google index. Without the parameters report, that would not have been possible. pic.twitter.com/CwllBsUwEn
— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) May 8, 2020
What do you all think? Should Google let you prick yourself?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
