We are encountering the following issue: Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site.
The site is an ecommerce site and has around 12M pages indexed in Google.
From the examples provided, a majority of links are from facets and internal search queries.
The facets are using rel="canonical" to the non faceted version and set to 'No URLs' via URL parameters. The search pages are noindexed and set to 'No URL's via URL parameters and up until recently were blocked via robots.txt.
Despite blocking the facets/search pages via URL parameters, using canonical, and noindex Googlebot is still crawling these pages.
I've heard that I should also be blocking the facets via robots.txt, but we had our search pages disallowed in robots.txt and Google did not honor it.
What other options do I have to resolve this issue?
Regrading @John Mueller's answer to a similar problem: Solving "Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site." He says that the message is sent out before the new URLs are crawled, meaning the robots.txt, and noindex robot tags, or rel=canonical are not known at that point. Given that the facets have been blocked since 2012, Google should not be finding these unique URLs from crawling our site internally, does this mean that people are externally linking to these faceted links, thus providing Google this list of faceted URLs?
x-robots-tag: noindex
to block these pages.