Salutations fellow readers, the weekly SEO news that you have been waiting for the whole week is FINALLY HERE! Let’s see what we have on the menu today.

• Google Search Console to discontinue URL Parameter tool on 26th April 2022
• Google’s John Mueller: Best To Have Google Discover New Sites With External Links Over URL Submission
• Google’s John Mueller: Keep old URLs that redirect in your XML sitemap file temporarily and not long term

25/3 – Google’s John Mueller: Best to have Google discover new sites with external links over URL submission

Google’s John Mueller said there is nothing wrong with using the Google Search Console URL inspection tool to request indexing.

BUT 

It would be better to have Google discover those new URLs on that new site through external links. It is simply better to have links to the site and for Google to pick up the site that way.

28/3 – Google Search Console to discontinue URL Parameters tool on 26th April

Google announced that on the 26th of April the URL Parameters tool would be discontinued under the legacy Google Search Console. 

In the Google document, they mentioned that the reason is that the URL Parameters tool has become obsolete as Google has become much better at guessing the useful and useless parameters on a site.

Moving forward, Google’s crawlers will learn how to deal with URL parameters automatically so you would no longer need to do anything to specify the function of URL parameters on your site.

So, if you need more control, you can use robots.txt rules (for example, you can specify parameter orders in an allow directive) or use hreflang to specify language variations of content.

30/3 – Google’s John Mueller: Keep old URLs that redirect in your XML sitemap file temporarily and not long term

In response to a Twitter user, Google’s John Mueller said that when doing a URL migration, it is totally fine to have redirects in the sitemap file temporarily which is usually between 1 to 3 months when the move is mostly complete. 

However, in the long run, you would want the URLs listed there that you want as canonical. 

Google’s John Mueller said that the reason for this is because redirects, the sitemap lightly helps with recrawling. Whereas for stable URLs, the sitemap will help with canonicalization. 

Wrap it up!

That’s it for this week’s SEO news. Remember to share your thoughts in the comments below. What do you think about this week’s news? Did I miss out on anything important? Let me know. 

Updated: 22 April 2024

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