As for the default value, submitting "sessionid=googlebot" failed badly.The error message "This parameter is a duplicate or contains invalid characters." indicates that you prefer to figure out the default value yourself. Wouldn't be a hint from the webmaster helpful in some cases?
- Sebastian
It's meant to ignore query parameters altogether, so you'd have to submit "sessionid" as a parameter if you wanted to have all "sessionid"s ignored; it's not meant for parameter/value pairs.
- John Mueller
Well, I can submit a query string variable like "sessionid" assigning "ignore". That should mean you ignore it, regardless its value (sessionid=1 ... sessionid=n). It should not mean that Google is supposed to ignore all parameters. With my faulty example I was referring to "URL parameters to ignore or select a default value for crawling" and thought it would make sense when the...
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- Sebastian
I'm confused :-) - where are you seeing "URL parameters to ignore or select a default value for crawling" in Webmaster Tools?
- John Mueller
Ahhh --- do you mean Pedro's tweet? If so, yes, that's not 100% correct, we don't specify default values. You can only request that they be ignored or not-ignored :)
- John Mueller
Wow, I just realized that it automatically suggests parameters that it already knows about, awesome :-). I should play with more sites :-)
- John Mueller
so if you are going to have your forum on it -- should you put that on a subdomain to help break it apart? or just put it in a different folder.
- Matt Ellsworth
MattE, certainly a subdirectory such as /forum/ or /forums/ would help segment those pages into a different part of your site.
- Matt Cutts
Really good talk. One thing I found odd was to try to switch between synonyms in a post: content is clearer and more understandable if you refer to the same thing the same way every time in a particular context. Is Google working to make synonym searching better to obviate the need to do that?
- Mark Trapp