Is setting deep filtered categories to noindex a good practise?

Question

The situation now: The project is not launched, but we have lot of categories and a big filter system in the end (color, brand, dimension, size, model, material,..).

Most of categories will have a product result page and a filter-sidebar. Sometimes also a unique text to help the customer which product to choose.

My problem are the deep filtered results:

https://example.com/nike-shoes-sneaker-yellow-size-11-leather

This page has maybe 2 products to display, no unique text, no filterbar (is already filtered)... The products will also not indexed (too many - restricted by robots.txt).

First Idea Setting every page with less than 20 products to noindex. And additionally hide the links which targeting the result from google (prg pattern)?

Answer 1

You don't necessarily need to noindex these pages as Google will identify search result pages and index pages automatically based on context. It is in fact good practice for crawling purposes to let search engines crawl these pages. While the index pages themselves won't rank very highly based on your indication of their content they will provide the links needed by search engines to identify the further pages that can be crawled (product pages). By allowing the search engine to crawl the filtered pages as well it can aid in providing context for the product pages being linked to.