Client had 380k indexed URLs. Real pages: 4,200.

Client had 380k indexed URLs. Real pages: 4,200.

Furniture store. Faceted nav generated a URL for every color+price+material combo. Google indexed 380,000 of them. Index bloat was strangling the money pages.

Did this:
— Picked ONE useful facet (category + material) to stay crawlable
— Everything else: rel=canonical to the clean category + parameter handling to block crawl on price/sort/color combos
— robots.txt disallow on ?sort= and ?price=

Ten weeks: indexed count fell to ~9,000. Category pages that were stuck position 14 climbed to 5-7. Revenue from organic up 22% quarter over quarter.

Go slow on robots disallow — block a param that's already ranking and you'll tank it overnight.