Long urls created by filters (not with query parameters)

[Alex-Harford]

A website adds subfolders to a category URL for each filter that's selected. In a crawl of the website some of these URLs reach over 400 characters. For example, if I select shoe size 5, 5.5 and 6, white and blue colour, price $70-$100, heel and platform styles, the URL will be as follows:

www.example.com/shoes/womens/filters/shoe-size--5--5.5--6/color--white--blue/price--70-100/style--heel--platform

There is a canonical that points to www.example.com/shoes/womens/ so it isn't a duplicate content issue.

But these URLs still get crawled. How would you handle this? It's not a great system so I'm tempted to tell them to start over with best practice recommendations, but maybe I should just tell them to block the "/filters/" folder from crawlers? For some products however, filtered content would be worth having in search indexes (e.g. colour).

[Travis_Bailey]

Apparently you don't have to worry about any of that if you just hack a .edu site. XD (see screen shot - no worries, did the right thing and emailed their technical contact) Seriously though, that isn't recommended.

Mother of pearl, some of the keywords the FDU site ranks for are low competition gold. Run it through SEM Rush and have fun. I can't exactly make a strong case for any super technical theory with crap like that ranking.

The Googles.... makes my head hurt... I'm going to go cry now.

Something something... save crawl budget doing it other ways...

Something something... look at Zappos and Nike's left sidebar menus.

I quit.

tVJ1Kxi

[Everett]

I would simply block the /filters/ folder for this client since those URLs aren't indexed (due to the canonical tag) and probably have zero links to contribute to the pagerank of the canonical page. All they're doing from a search engine's perspective is eating up crawl budget.

I understand about the color filter, however. There are several options:

1. Don't worry about it. Right now it's not helping anyway since the color filter URLs rel canonical to the main category URL. If you are seeing traffic from search engines going directly into a color filter URL as a landing page from the SERPs then the canonical tag probably isn't working. If you're not seeing them as organic search landing pages, then what difference does it make, traffic-wise, if you block them?
2. Create sub-categories for color if the pages are that important.
3. Force the color filter to show up first in the URL and exempt it from the robots.txt block...

allow: ///filters/color/
disallow: ///filters/

I'm not sure about what Travis is trying to say. Sounds like he's having a bad Google day.

[Travis_Bailey]

Completely bad Google day. Hacked universities set me off.

[Everett]

I certainly know the feeling.