Case: collapsing 6 URL parameters into clean paths recovered 22% of wasted crawl

Case: collapsing 6 URL parameters into clean paths recovered 22% of wasted crawl

Faceted nav generated ?color=&size=&sort= combos — 240,000 crawlable URLs for 4,000 real products. Log analysis showed Googlebot spending 31% of hits on parameter junk. SOP:

— Step 1 (analyst): parsed 30 days of access logs, bucketed bot hits by URL pattern. Gate: any pattern >5% of crawl with 0 organic landings = waste.
— Step 2 (dev): canonicalized all sort/filter combos to the clean category path.
— Step 3 (dev): added parameter rules in Search Console and disallowed sort= in robots.txt.
— Step 4 (analyst): re-pulled logs at day 30.

Outcome: crawlable URLs 240k to 19k. Bot hits on real product pages +22%. New products indexed in 3 days vs prior 11.

Guardrail: canonical first, robots disallow second — disallowing before canonical strands signals.

Ship gate: don't publish until all boxes are checked.