<b>The faceted nav that ate 4M crawl URLs</b>

<b>The faceted nav that ate 4M crawl URLs</b>

Client had a shop with color + size + brand + price filters. Every combo was a crawlable URL. Googlebot was eating 4 million parameter pages, indexing 2k real ones.

What I did:
— Picked the 3 filter combos that actually get searched (brand + category mostly)
— Made those clean static paths: /shoes/nike/
— Everything else got <code>rel=canonical</code> back to the bare category and a noindex
— Blocked the junk params in robots.txt only AFTER they de-indexed, not before

Crawl stats dropped to sane levels in three weeks. Real pages got crawled 5x more often.

Watch the order: block in robots too early and Google can't see the noindex to drop them. Let it crawl them out first.