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I have a web page with a dozen tables of data on it, each with half a dozen columns. Every table can be sorted by a column by clicking on the relevant header, and these get appended to the querystring.

e.g. a page with three tables sorted by column 4, 6, and descending 3:

page.html?s1=4&s2=6&s3=-3

etc.

I have nofollow links on the column headers, and

<link rel="canonical" href="page.html">

on the page.

But bing still crawls its way through thousands of combinations. 5772 of them yesterday!

I've marked s1/s2/s3/s4... as parameters to ignore (a long time ago), but that's not helped.

How can I prevent it from doing this? It's unnecessary server load for no gain.

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    I am thinking that Bing has to crawl these to know what applies. I would be less concerned over the crawl and more concerned if these show up in the SERPs.
    – closetnoc
    Nov 12, 2015 at 19:57
  • I don't buy that. It has all the facts it needs to know not to crawl those pages before it crawls them...
    – Codemonkey
    Nov 12, 2015 at 20:48

1 Answer 1

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You could tell Bing, and other webcrawlers, what to spider and what to ignore using a file called robots.txt in the root of your website.

You can tell specific or all crawlers to ignore specific urls.

in your case 

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /*?s1=*&s2=*&s3=*

you might need to make small changes in the Disallow line depending on the parameters used in your site.

More on robots.txt files here

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