<b>Faceted nav: block crawling or just noindex?</b>

<b>Faceted nav: block crawling or just noindex?</b>

'Q: I added noindex to my filter pages but Google still wastes crawl budget on them. What gives?'

<b>Short answer:</b> noindex stops indexing, not crawling — those are two different problems.

The longer version: a <code>noindex</code> tag only works after Googlebot fetches the page and reads the tag, so every filtered URL still gets crawled. On a store with 40 filters across 200 categories, that's millions of low-value URLs eating your budget before anything gets de-indexed.

The fix is layered. Decide which facet combos have search demand (color, brand) and let those be real indexable pages. For the infinite junk (price sliders, multi-select stacks), block the parameter pattern in robots.txt so Google never fetches it. Use <code>rel=nofollow</code> on internal facet links so you stop feeding crawlers the path in the first place.

Rule of thumb: noindex for pages you want seen-but-not-ranked, robots block for pages you don't want crawled at all.

Got an e-com SEO question? Drop it.