The self-canonical facet trap

The self-canonical facet trap
Client swore their faceted nav was clean. Filter pages all had a canonical tag. Cool. Except every ?color=red&size=l page canonicaled to itself. So Google indexed 40,000 combinations and called it a content farm.

The fix I ran:
— pointed every parametered URL canonical at the bare category
— left ONE seo-worthy facet (color) open with its own static URL
— killed the rest with the canonical, not robots

Self-canonical isn't 'clean'. It's a green light to index junk. Canonical means 'this is the master', not 'this exists'.

Watch your one kept facet — give it a real static path, not a param, or you're back where you started.