You turned filters into permanent folders

You turned filters into permanent folders
Fashion site baked every filter into the path: /shoes/red/size-9/leather/under-100. Thousands of crawlable folder combos, all thin, all near-dupes. Index bloat city.

The move:
— moved low-value filters back to query params and blocked them in robots
— kept only high-intent combos as static folders (e.g. /red-running-shoes) where search demand existed
— canonicaled param versions to the parent

A filter is a runtime choice, not a page — unless real people search for that exact combo. Then, and only then, it earns a folder.

Watch your robots block doesn't also choke the canonical signal — block crawling OR canonical, not both on the same URL.