What to do about Google Crawl Error due to Faceted Navigation?

[EugeneF]

We are getting many crawl errors listed in Google webmaster tools.  We use some faceted navigation with several variables.   Google sees these as "500" response code.  It looks like Google is truncating the url.  Can we tell Google not to crawl these search results using part of the url ("sort=" for example)?  Is there a better way to solve this?

[KaneJamison]

It sounds like you should be able to go into GWT and go to Configuration > URL Parameters and tell Google which URL parameters you don't want to be crawled.

They have a quick guide to doing this correctly at https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687. Definitely read through that before you do anything, to make sure you don't accidentally deindex more than you planned on...