The URL Parameters tool in Search Console will be retired in a month. Current users of the tool do not need to take any action.
When the URL Parameters tool was introduced in 2009 in Webmaster Tools, the predecessor of Search Console, the internet was a lot messier than it is today. SessionID parameters were very common, CMS had problems organizing the parameters and browsers often couldn’t interpret links correctly. The URL Parameters tool gave site owners detailed control over how Google crawls their site. To do this, they indicated how certain parameters affect the content of their website.
Google has learned a lot over the years and has become better and better at assessing which parameters are helpful on a website and which are not. In fact, only about 1% of the parameter configurations currently specified in the URL Parameters tool provide any value when crawled. Since the tool is ineffective for both Google and Search Console users, it will be discontinued in a month.
You no longer need to specify the function of URL parameters on your websites. Google’s crawlers automatically learn how to handle URL parameters.
If you need more control, you can use robots.txt rules, for example to set the order of parameters in an allow statement, or use hreflang to specify language variants of content.
