How do you manage faceted navigation SEO issues?

Short answer: Faceted navigation typically causes three kinds of damage: crawl budget burned on endless combinations, duplicate content, and index bloat. The fix is an explicit rule set per facet: index it, crawl but do not index it, or block it entirely.

The three-tier rule set

• Indexable facets: the few combinations with genuine search demand, supported by clean URLs and unique copy.
• Crawlable but not indexable: needed by users, useless for search; governed with canonicals or noindex.
• Blocked: parameters carrying no signal, such as sort order or page size; excluded from crawling via robots.txt.

Verification

Do not assume the rules hold; prove it with log files: where do search engine bots actually spend their time? Normalize parameter order, cap the URLs your filter links expose, and track the page count in indexing reports. If that count drifts far from the real number of products and categories you sell, the rule set is leaking.