I'm wondering if setting the URL Parameter in GWM for "prod" would help in the same way it helped for "pg". Perhaps setting the parameter to "Specifies" or "Narrows", since the prod does change each time.

Thoughts...?

I think that one is probably fine, but if you set it, I think "specifies" is the one.

It has been a few weeks so I wanted to post a little update here. I set my url parameter in WMT for "prod" to Specifies. The indexed pages rose a bit, but the bigger result was Google started coughing up old/bad/outdated url's. I guess that setting the "prod" url parameter created sort of a cleaning effect. While I don't like seeing any errors, I am happy to get these bad url's out of there and get clean ones in.

The end result (so far) from setting this parameter is Google coughed up and discarded approximately 150-175 bad/outdated url's that I didn't know were in there and added approximately 350+ new url's.

I set a new parameter for "cat" to Narrows a few days ago but haven't seen anything significant yet. If so, I'll update here.

Hi all,

Been following this thread as I recently switched one site to https.

I'm a bit confused on this though:
Make sure you are looking at the correct property in WMT, [red]you should have four of them now[/red]

I have 3 showing (https://wwww. sitename -- http://sitename-- http://www. sitename).

What's the 4th one? I'm guessing https://sitename?

Julie
Owned & loved by 7 German Shepherds

That's right Julie.
Personally, I have the old ones, but being that I am forcing all traffic to https://www.mysite, that's probably the only one I need.

That's what I was thinking, too. But WMT wouldn't let me set a preferred domain until I had both the https://www and the https:// listed. Weird...

So I now have all 8, plus 2 more (hobby site) on the Search Console. LOL!

Julie
Owned & loved by 7 German Shepherds

Since a few more weeks have passed now, I felt I would post an update. Setting the parameters for prod, cat and pg has turned out to be very lucrative in the way of page indexing. After setting these parameters, my indexed pages have increased by the thousands. Every day I receive 10-20 more pages indexed. This has also been very beneficial in weeding out old, outdated and obsolete pages. Google has kicked up hundreds of urls that I didn't know existed, and that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

The URL Parameter setting is an amazing feature in WMT. I highly suggest using it.

That's great to hear and thanks for letting everyone know. Just to be clear, that was following David's advice here?

quote:

---

In my GWT account, I have the left column showing some URL parameters that it has found.
ECT uses "pg" for pages in the URL.
I have the following set for that

Does this parameter change page content seen by the user?
Yes:Changes, reorders, or narrows page content

How does this parameter affect page content?
Paginates

Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl?
Every URL

Most of them I have set to let googlebot decide, except cat,scri,prod,pg

---

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

That is correct - kudos dbdave!