We nofollowed 11,000 faceted-nav links and the category pages woke up. PageRank sculpting isn't dead.
'Nofollow sculpting died in 2009' — sure, the old hack did. But faceted navigation still hemorrhages equity into infinite filter combos: ?color=red&size=m&sort=price.
An apparel site had Googlebot drowning in 11,000+ crawlable filter URLs, most thin or duplicate. We blocked the low-value parameter links via robots + nofollow and consolidated signals onto the ~120 canonical category/subcategory pages.
Over 12 weeks: crawl budget to real category pages jumped, those 120 pages gained an average of 2.8 positions, and 'index bloat' in Search Console dropped by 9,400 URLs.
You can't sculpt your way to more PageRank — but you can absolutely stop flushing it down a faceted drain.
How many junk filter URLs is Google crawling on your site tonight?
Link Equity Heat
@LinkEquityHeat
We nofollowed 11,000 faceted-nav links and the category pages woke up. PageRank sculpting isn't dead.
Этот пост опубликован в Telegram-канале Link Equity Heat. Подписаться можно по ссылке: @LinkEquityHeat.