The Parameter Handling tool is dead. Stop looking for its replacement.

The Parameter Handling tool is dead. Stop looking for its replacement.

Myth: there's a Search Console setting to tell Google which URL parameters to ignore.

Reality: Google retired it in 2022 and said it was so rarely useful they didn't bother replacing it. They claimed to handle parameters well enough on their own. For your faceted nav, they often don't.

Here's the thing. The replacement was never a tool — it's architecture. robots disallow on the parameter pattern. Or rel-canonical to the clean URL. Or, best, not generating ten thousand crawlable parameter permutations in the first place.

The tradeoff: disallow is brute and fast but blinds Google to anything useful behind the parameter. Canonical is gentle but costs crawl. Not emitting the links costs nothing and works best.

There is no button. There's only how you built the URLs.