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Thanks for the detailed answer Jonathan. What you suggested was definitely in line with my thinking - indexing just the single topics at most and trying to either noindex or canonicalize all the thousands of possible variations. I definitely agree that all those random combinations of topics/objects hold no real value and at best will eat up crawl budget unnecessarily. I can make sure Google treats these parameters as URLs via Search Console, they're unique to this piece of content; and I think I can noindex all the random combinations of filters (hopefully). I'm still waiting to hear more from the dev team but I have a feeling that I won't be able to change the format to subdirectories instead of differentiating everything with query parameters - not the ideal situation but I'll have to make do. Anyways, thanks again for your thoughtful reply! Josh

Do you know what the redirect type is (301 or 302)? If it is a 301, I wouldn't worry about it. If it is a 302, I'd try and get that changed. Either way, it is unlikely to make a big impact on your site.

I've installed Google custom search engine (CSE) on multiple client websites. The $100 option is a good place to start, that gets you 20K queries. Plus, over the past year Google has updated the features and UI allowing to easily customize the look and feel of the CSE. Attached is a screengrab showing the CSE UI. Hope that helps! VHV7RcM

Thanks guys, those are really useful - just what I was looking for. Appreciate the help!

Thanks Travis, I'll take a look at both.

You're probably not using google.ca. It ranks slightly lower on google.com.