Tame faceted nav before it eats your crawl budget

Tame faceted nav before it eats your crawl budget
Ecom client had 90k crawlable filter combos from 200 real products. Insane. The lockdown checklist:
— List every filter: color, size, price, brand, sort, page
— Pick the 2-3 with real search demand (e.g. brand, color) — those get clean indexable URLs
— Everything else: block the parameter in robots.txt OR rel=canonical back to the clean category
— Sort orders and price sliders: always noindex, they make zero unique value
— Kill 'add to filter' links with nofollow if combos still explode
— Confirm in Search Console > Crawl Stats that bot hits on ?sort= drop
Bot wasted 70% of budget on junk. Reclaimed it in two weeks.
Never noindex AND canonical the same URL — pick one or you confuse the bot.