Changing URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools

[znotes]

We have a bit of a conundrum. Webmaster tools is telling us that they are crawling too many URLs:

Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site: http://www.uncommongoods.com/

In their list of URL examples, all of the URLs have tons of parameters. We would probably be ok telling Google not to index any of the URLs with parameters. We have a great URL structure. All of our category and product pages have clean links (no parameters) The parameters come only from sorts and filters. We don't have a need for Google to index all of these pages.

However, Google Analytics is showing us that over the last year, we received a substantial amount of search revenue from many of these URLs (800+ of them converted)

So, Google is telling us they are unhappy. We want to make Google happy by ignoring all of the paramter URLs, but we're worried this will kill the revenue we're seeing.

Two questions here:

1. What do we have to lose by keeping everything as-is. Google is giving us errors, but other than that what are the negative repercussions?

2. If we were to de-index all of the parameter URLs via Webmaster tools, how much of the revnenue would likely be recovered by our non-parameter URLs?

I've linked to a screenshot from Google Analytics

ArxMSMG.jpg

[kwoolf]

Common behavior for a visitor on an e-commerce site is to reach a catalog page and then use the available search and filter functions to find items he or she is looking for. Preventing indexing of these pages will certainly not prevent visitors from accessing those pages and converting into customers. I'm betting that these overly dynamic URLs aren't your landing pages, so I would certainly add URL parameters to WT to tell the search engines how to best handle these URLs on crawls.

This should answer your questions https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en