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

Hello,

We're putting together a large piece of content that will have some interactive filtering elements. There are two types of filters, topics and object types.

The architecture under the hood constrains us so that everything needs to be in URL parameters. If someone selects a single filter, this can look pretty clean:

www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic
or
www.domain.com/project?object=typeOne

The problems arise when people select multiple topics, potentially across two different filter types:

www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic-secondTopic-thirdTopic&object=typeOne-typeTwo

I've raised concerns around the structure in general, but it seems to be too late at this point so now I'm scratching my head thinking of how best to get these indexed. I have two main concerns:

1. A ton of near-duplicate content and hundreds of URLs being created and indexed with various filter combinations added
2. Over-reacting to the first point above and over-canonicalizing/no-indexing combination pages to the detriment of the content as a whole

Would the best approach be to index each single topic filter individually, and canonicalize any combinations to the 'view all' page? I don't have much experience with e-commerce SEO (which this problem seems to have the most in common with) so any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder.

Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible).

Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm.

Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible.

Thanks in advance!