How can I remove parameters from the GSC URL blocking tool?

[Vsood]

Hello Mozzers

My client's previous SEO company went ahead and blindly blocked a number of parameters using the GSC URL blocking tool. This has now caused Google to stop crawling many pages on my client's website and I am not sure how to remove these blocked parameters so that they can be crawled and reindexed by Google.

The crawl setting is set to "Let Google bot decide" but still there has been a drop in the number of pages being crawled. Can someone please share their experience and help me delete these blocked parameters from GSC's URL blocking tool.

Thank you Mozzers!

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Vincent,

My short answer is: don't let Googlebot decide. Tell Googlebot which parameters should or should not create new pages. This is something you should do if you ever have indexation problems with parameters.

Do a site: search for a handful of these URLs with parameters to double check that the drop in the number of pages being crawled is because of these pages or because of something else. If it is because of these pages, you can quickly add them back to the index by using the "Fetch as Googlebot" tool. Once you have Google fetch something, you have the option of submitting it to the index.

(If it turns out the drop in crawled pages is from something else, a good way to figure out which pages are being affected is by creating multiple XML sitemaps and organizing them by site section, so when Google reports on how many of your URLs are in its index, you quickly know which section of the site is being affected. This post is really old, but still incredibly useful here.)

Double check that these URLs with parameters are in the XML sitemap, and that you have a number of internal links on prominent pages pointing to them. Even if these can only be temporary, those links will really help the process.

Hope this helps!

Kristina