Last night while going over some clients’ accounts in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools I noticed a new feature which hadn’t been there a few days ago. Under Site configuration / Settings there is now a section called Parameter Handling where you can set whether or not Google should ignore any of the parameters that are contained in your URL strings.

Please be very careful with these unless you’re absolutely certain you know what you’re doing. While the tool may well be useful to avoid pages appearing under multiple URLs, a mistake here could easily drop pages from their index that you want in there. There’s a description of the new tool from ex-Google employee Vanessa Fox published on the Search Engine Land site yesterday. Recommended reading. I’ll add any other discussions I see on it that look useful.