"Faceted Navigation was 50%: This occurs on websites (often e-commerce) that allow users to filter and sort items by various dimensions like price, category, or manufacturer. These combinations create a massive number of unique URL patterns. Googlebot may try to crawl all of them to determine their value, potentially crashing the server or rendering the site useless for users due to heavy load."
"Action Paramters was 25%: These are URL parameters that trigger a specific action rather than changing the page content significantly. Common examples include parameters like ?add_to_cart=true or ?add_to_wishlist=true. Adding these parameters doubles or triples the URL space (e.g., a product page URL vs. the same URL with an "add to cart" parameter), causing the crawler to waste resources on identical content. These are often injected by CMS plugins, such as those for WordPress."
"These issues with crawling can impact a site's performance because bots might go in a loop of the site and cause server issues because of the load the bot is putting on the server resources. And as Gary said, "once it discovers a set of URLs, it cannot make a decision about whether that URL space is good or not unless it crawled a large chunk of that URL space.""
Faceted navigation created half of the crawling problems by producing massive numbers of unique URL patterns when users filter or sort items across dimensions like price, category, or manufacturer. Action parameters accounted for 25% of issues; parameters that trigger actions such as ?add_to_cart=true multiply URL variants without altering core content, often added by CMS plugins. Irrelevant parameters such as UTM tags and session IDs comprised about 10% of problems and confuse crawlers about content relevance. Aggressive crawling of these expanded URL spaces can overload servers, create crawling loops, and force bots to traverse large URL chunks before assessing value.
Read at Search Engine Roundtable
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