Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation is a filtering system (common on ecommerce category pages) that generates a distinct URL for nearly every combination of filters — size, color, price, brand.

Faceted navigation is one of the most common causes of runaway crawl budget waste and duplicate content on large sites, since a category with 10 filter options can mathematically generate thousands of near-identical filtered URLs, most with no independent search value. The standard fix combines canonicalization to the unfiltered category page, selective crawl blocking of low-value parameter combinations, and only allowing genuinely high-demand filter combinations (a specific, searched-for size+category pairing) to be indexed as their own URL.