John Mueller from Google has confirmed an issue with the data being displayed in the URL parameter tool within the old Google Search Console. In short, the tool is showing sometimes zero and often less than it should, URL parameter settings for the sites that have configured them. There are numerous complaints over the past 24-hours of this.
Ryan Mews was one of the first to spot this. He said "Did something change in GSC's URL Parameter handling area? Seeing little to no parameters where there was once 100+ parameters for large e-com sites." This is an example screen shot he shared:
John Mueller from Google confirmed the issue on Twitter and wrote "There's some weirdness with the data shown there, we're working on getting that resolved. Sorry for the confusion!"
Here are more examples:
I'm seeing the same. About the usual number of parameters on the list... But, the number of "URLs monitored" is now completely empty. Which is very odd for this site.
— Jeff Flowers (@Bukowsky) January 6, 2020
(Nothing abnormal with our log files / crawl activity) pic.twitter.com/TVErpZi6n5
Just to update this thread... Looks like the initial landing page might be glitching. It has changed but they added in a "Configure URL parameters" link which then takes you to the parameters. The "Add parameter" button was removed on the initial landing page. pic.twitter.com/8OLmiaTz2h
— Ryan Mews (@RyanMews) January 7, 2020
Here is John's response:
There's some weirdness with the data shown there, we're working on getting that resolved. Sorry for the confusion!
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2020
So far now, do not worry about this report - we will keep you posted.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: This may be fixed now but no official word from Google yet:
Thanks for the update, John... From what I can tell, the URL Param tool appears to be back to normal.
— Jeff Flowers (@Bukowsky) January 7, 2020
Same screenshot as yesterday. Looks like the data within 'URLs monitored' is now back. pic.twitter.com/ETYxzRiWOj