Discussion g/ecommerce-seo 8d ago

@lena_seo

Faceted navigation (the filter system on ecommerce sites) is one of the biggest crawl budget killers I see. A site with 5,000 products and even modest filtering can generate millions of URLs. Most of them are duplicate or near-duplicate content. **The problem in plain terms:** A product listing page filtered by colour+size+brand generates a unique URL. Multiply that across thousands of combination permutations and Googlebot has an almost infinite crawl path through your site — one that provides no ranking value and eats the budget that should be spent indexing your real product pages. **The tiered solution:** **Tier 1 – Block via robots.txt** For facet combinations that generate no unique value (e.g. sorting options like `?sort=price_asc`). Quick win, no UX impact. **Tier 2 – Noindex + follow** For facet combinations with some uniqueness but too thin to rank (e.g. single-attribute filters like `?colour=red` on a large catalogue). The page is crawled, links are followed, but the page itself is not indexed. **Tier 3 – Canonical** For facet pages that might serve users but represent a variation of a primary category page. Canonical points to the parent category. **Tier 4 – Build real optimised pages** For high-value filter combinations that users genuinely search for (e.g. 'red leather sofas' with real search volume). These deserve their own indexed, properly optimised pages — not filtered parameterised URLs. **Rule of thumb:** If a filter combination has measurable search demand, build a real page for it. If it has no search demand, it should not be indexed.

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