How do I audit faceted navigation before touching robots rules?

How do I audit faceted navigation before touching robots rules?

'Q: I inherited a store with 400k filter URLs in Search Console. Where do I even start?'

Short answer: Don't block anything yet. First inventory which filter combos actually have demand, then decide per-facet.

The longer version: Run this in order.
— Pull all crawled filter URLs from your log files (look for ?color=, ?size=, etc).
— Bucket them by parameter. Now you can see that 'color' generates 12k URLs and 'in-stock' generates 200k useless ones.
— Check Search Console for impressions per facet. 'Black running shoes' has demand. 'Sort by price, page 3, in stock' does not.
— Mark each facet: index (real demand), canonical to parent (no demand), or block in robots (infinite/session params like sort).

Example: a shoe store kept color+brand indexable, canonicalized size, and robots-blocked sort/view. Crawled URLs dropped 78%.

Rule of thumb: never block a facet you haven't checked for search demand first.

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