Your faceted navigation is generating a billion URLs and you let it

Your faceted navigation is generating a billion URLs and you let it

The failure mode: color + size + price + sort + page, all as crawlable links. Five filters with ten values each and you've handed Googlebot 100,000 near-duplicate URLs per category.

This is the one case where crawl budget actually bites mid-size sites. Google burns its crawl on ?color=red&sort=asc&page=7 and never reaches your new products.

The fix is not "add canonical and hope." Canonical doesn't stop the crawl. Use robots.txt to disallow the parameter combinations you never want indexed, and serve filter links as non-crawlable where it makes sense.

Google's John Mueller has said faceted nav is the number-one crawl-budget killer he sees.

Fix the URL space, not the symptoms.