<b>Faceted nav: noindex isn't the same as blocking crawl</b>

<b>Faceted nav: noindex isn't the same as blocking crawl</b>

'Q: I noindexed my filter pages but Google still crawls millions of them. Why?'

<b>Short answer:</b> noindex stops indexing, not crawling — Googlebot has to fetch a page to see the noindex tag, so the crawl waste continues.

The longer version: people treat <code>noindex</code> as a faucet shutoff. It's not. It's a sign Googlebot can only read after walking through the door. If you have color × size × brand × price combinations, that's tens of thousands of URLs Google still requests every cycle.

The real lever is whether those URLs are <i>linkable</i>. If your filters are crawlable <code>&lt;a href&gt;</code> links, bots follow them. Convert non-indexable filters to buttons that fire a request without a unique crawlable URL, or block the parameter pattern in robots.txt so they're never fetched.

Rule of thumb: noindex the few filter pages with real demand, make the rest un-crawlable rather than just un-indexable.

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