Google's John Mueller said on Friday's webmaster hangout that while the current URL parameter tool has been missing data for a while, it is not a sign that Google will deprecate it. In fact, he said when the tool does migrate to the new Search Console, it "will have some really cool stuff coming out."
John would not say more outside of "it'll be pretty cool" and he does not want to pre-announce anything.
He said this at the 11:04 mark when Mihai asked him about what is going on with the missing data in the URL parameter tool. John said the data should be fixed "fairly soon."
Here is the transcript on the data issue part:
The data there has been missing for a really long time but that's not because we want to deprecate it it's just because things things are weirdly stuck on our side with kind of the various teams that are involved with creating that data. Internally we use kind of similar data already, it's not that we we don't follow that input at all. It's just the data that we display in Search Console is kind of stuck just before it reaches Search Console.And my my understanding is that that should get resolved fairly soon but i've been hoping that that's fairly soon for a while now. So I've been nudging a little bit more. Hopefully that'll get better.
Then he hinted at what is to come, without saying more than it would be very cool and useful for very large sites:
With regards to moving to the new Search Console, My understanding is that they do want to kind of keep that functionality and move that to to the new tool as well. I expect especially for for larger websites we will have some really cool stuff coming out as well over time that. Yeah it'll be pretty cool. I don't want to pre-announce anything so i'm not going to go into more any details there. But it definitely is something that makes sense to focus on like you mentioned for e-commerce sites with a lot of parameters. You can clean up some things there and make it a little bit easier to crawl and index your site.
We know Google still uses the data from this tool, a lot. And Google did say the URL parameter may change, which is why we have not seen it migrate yet from the old Search Console to the new Search Console.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
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