You have to decide if the parameter values and indeed the parameter name itself have keyword value for your URL/URI and if removing them would alter search performance. Here is what I mean.
You will want to revisit any keyword research you have done. If it has been a while (a year or more), then you may want to briefly analyze your keyword usage again but do not stress yourself with this too much. You just want a solid baseline to work from.
When a search engine examines a URL/URI, they break the string by word boundaries and strip away the non-alpha-numeric characters. What is left is weighted first from left to right, then by keyword phrases and search history. What is left is a ranking of importance for the keyword terms in order. You will want to look at your URL/URI the same way and see what is important and what is not. Include any possible parameter values (within reason). Treat it like a header tag if you will. Ask yourself if what is left can be somewhat conversational (sentence like) without stop words (such as the, as, a, and so on).
While the URL/URI is important, what is more important is the title
tag, your one and only h1
tag, any other header tags, your content, and any backlinks. With semantic search, this has more value. The importance of a URL/URI has dropped somewhat preferring actual content for weight along with user votes and clues which is what a link tends to be.
A very lean URL/URI can focus how your site is found.
You may find that the parameters that you want to delete are not competitive or very competitive. You may find that removing the parameters would lean-out your URL/URI and focus how your site is found. Any URL/URI should reflect your most 2-3 important keywords per page. It should support your title
tag and h1
tag as much as it can. Check to see if your parameters and values have weight. If you find that the parameters and values have weight, then I would think twice about deleting them.
I went through the same exercise last year and removed all parameters except one that is actually an alias which can represent several parameters. This allowed me some flexibility in how to keyword weigh any page without having to disrupt search too much. In my case, the parameter is purely conversational.