Google has announced this morning that on April 26, 2022 it will be killing off the URL parameter tool under the legacy Google Search Console. This is a bit of a surprise being that Google did say it was planning on vastly improving it but some Googlers also wanted to see the tool go away.
Google wrote "we're deprecating the URL Parameters tool in Search Console in 1 month." Google added that there is "no action required from the current users of the tool."
Google said it was not used much, only about 1%, Google wrote. "Over the years, Google became much better at guessing which parameters are useful on a site and which are —plainly put— useless. In fact, only about 1% of the parameter configurations currently specified in the URL Parameters tool are useful for crawling. Due to the low value of the tool both for Google and Search Console users, we're deprecating the URL Parameters tool in 1 month."
Google did say they do heavily use what the URL parameter tool settings specify. Which was why Google said they will change the tool to make it better.
The tool did launch in 2009 and here is what it looked like then:
Some SEOs might be upset about this, but others are probably happy it is going away.
Just to be clear, any of the settings you added will stop working after April 26, 2022:
The settings will stop being used too (if you can't change them anymore, it wouldn't be good to keep them).
— 🦝 John (personal) 🦝 (@JohnMu) March 28, 2022
So what do you do going forward? Use robots.txt, improve your CMS and internal linking and if you have regional languages, use hreflang.
What did Google say about its hint about improving the tool? John said, things change...
Things change over time.
— 🦝 John (personal) 🦝 (@JohnMu) March 28, 2022
Forum discussion at Twitter.
