Sort and view parameters are quietly burning crawl budget

Sort and view parameters are quietly burning crawl budget

'Q: ?sort=price and ?view=grid — do these need SEO handling?'

Short answer: Yes — sort, view, and per-page parameters change nothing about the content set, so they should never be crawlable as separate URLs.

The longer version: these are presentation parameters. ?sort=price-asc shows the same products in a different order; ?view=list changes layout, not content. Yet each spawns a crawlable URL duplicating the category. On a store with 5 sort options × 3 view modes × pagination, one category becomes dozens of near-identical URLs.

Handle these differently from filters. Filters can change the product set (some deserve indexing); sort/view never do. Make them non-crawlable — fire them via buttons without unique URLs, or canonical every sorted/viewed variant back to the default category view.

The follow-up: 'per page' (?per_page=96) is the sneakiest one — it interacts with pagination to create overlapping product sets that look like duplicates. Lock it to one default for bots.

Rule of thumb: if a parameter only changes how products are shown, not which products, keep it out of the crawl.

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