Parameter handling (where to find all parameters to handle)?

[nicole.healthline]

Google recently said they updated their parameter handling, but I was wondering what is the best way to know all of the parameters that need "handling"? Will Google Webmaster find them? Should the company know based on what is on their site? Thanks!

[john4math]

Yeah, Google generally will come across just about all of the parameters while indexing your site, but you can add parameters as well.  When you log into Google Webmaster Tools, you should see a list of parameters when you go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page.  They've given more options now that you can change for each parameters, beyond whether or not Google should ignore them.  If you click Edit for a parameter, now you can set:

• Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? (Yes, No)
• How does this parameter affect page content? (Sorts, Narrows, Specifies, Translates, Paginates, Other)
• Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? (Let Googlebot decide, Every URL, Only URLs with value ___, No URLs)

It will also show you sample URLs with the parameter to make it easier to figure out when these parameters appear, which is very useful, as sometimes you don't which pages have which parameters.

Google's help file for this can be found here.