Optimize URL Parameters For Blogger in Webmaster Tools
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You were recently presented with a post on Configuring URL Parameters in webmaster tools but details specific to BlogSpot blogs will be shared today because incorrectly optimizingURLs could make your blog posts and pages stop appearing in Google Search. We must congratulate Google for making it easy for webmasters to more easily control how their websites be crawled unlike Bing which never stops begging to optimize "Query Parameters for Normalization" without even specifying what parameters to ignore!
URL parameters help Google to crawl your site more efficiently and give priority to your more useful content by controlling the parameters that effect the site content. In blogging platforms like Wordpress and BlogSpot, there are several parameters, that effect the page content. Famous amongst them are replytocom, Showcomment,commentPage, m and utm parameters. We will be guiding you through all this headache to make it pretty simple to optimize URLs for Blogger blogs and enhance your SEO.
Note: To understand this post clearly kindly first read about some related terminologies in this post:
Some Important Parameters
To check what parameters Google has found out on your blog, simply log into yourwebmasters account and then click Configuration > URL Parameters
You will then see a list of around 7-8 parameters for which you need to specify their behavior. The number of these parameters could be greater if you are using Google Custom Search
Some of these parameters are:
- showComment
- m
- commentPage
- utm_source
- utm_medium
- utm_campaign
- max-results
- updated-max
- share
Parameters follow a URL with a question mark. See an example of the showComment parameter.
http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2012/08/website-testing-effects-performance.html?showComment=1345044786974
This parameter tells Googlebot about the location of a comment on the page by comment id. In blogger each comment has an alpha numeric id that starts with alphabet "c" and contains numbers as the remaining characters.
Optimization Settings
To make things fast, safe and easy I am sharing below the webmaster sheet for MBT blog to give you an idea of what options to choose for each entry. You will find Edit andReset link to the right of each parameter. Make the settings for each parameter one by one as shown in the snapshot that follows.
Remember these points:
- This method will only make crawling easy for Googlebot and will not make any of your pages disappearing from search.
- You need to set Effect and Crawl entries only
- To see the structure of the URL you can click "show example URLs" in the popup window to pre-check how the URL looks like.
- Effect None here means that the parameter does not change the content of the page.
- Effect Paginates here is used for CommentPage and m because both are simple identifiers to show page number for comments greater than 200 in Blogger
- Effect Sorts is chosen for max-results and updated-max because both sorts the page content in order of time and date.
- For parameters we were not too sure we chose "Let Googlebot decide" instead of choosing "No URL"
The snapshot below will make your task even more easy. Carefully set the options as shown.
Will it reduce Crawl Errors?
Fortunately yes it does! Most of the errors are caused by duplicate URLS or due to absence of canonical link attributes. This method makes it extremely easy to control the URL structure of your Blog within your webmasters account.
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