Does a sitemap override Google parameter handling?

[rhoadesjohn]

This question might seem silly, but I'll ask anyway.

We have an eCommerce site with a ton of duplicate content, mostly caused by faceted navigation.  In researching ways to reduce the clutter, I've decided to use Google parameter handling to stop Googlebot from crawling pages with certain parameters, like: sort order, page #, etc...

Now my question:

If I set all of these parameters so that Googlebot doesn't crawl the grids, how will they ever find the individual product pages?  We do upload a sitemap with all of the product pages.  Does this solve my issue?  Or, should I handle the duplicate content with noindex, follow tag?

Or, is there an even better way?

Thanks

[Rubix]

I would recommend you to use 'Canonical Link'

You can find more here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

[Everett]

Hello John,

This is a very good question, and something people don't often think about when blocking the navigational paths on their site from being crawled.

Depending on how fast your category pages load and how many products are on each of them, you may consider a View All Canonical page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

There are many different ways to handle faceted navigation problems, including javascrpt, GWT parameter handling, robots meta, robots.txt, rel canonical... and combinations of these. The right approach should be customized for your specific needs. When possible, I prefer to allow Google to crawl and index down to a certain level of faceting, similar to allowing them into sub-categories (though it depends entirely on your taxonomy) but not tertiary (i.e. sub-sub) categories. For the next couple of levels I might allow them to crawl, but not index. And once it gets down to 4 or 5 levels deep (e.g. /?category=1&size=5&color=blue&price=low&this=that&so-on=so-forth...) I just block them from being both indexed and crawled (i.e. Meta NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW or robots.txt block) to save crawl budget by avoiding spider traps.

With all of that said, if you are giving Google an XML sitemap that contains the indexable URLs to all of your products they should have no problem indexing them, regardless of whether or not they can crawl all the way through your faceted navigation.