The symptom
- Search Console shows many *Duplicate without user-selected canonical* URLs with query strings.
- No
<link rel="canonical">on product/category pages.
Why it matters
Engines and assistants consolidate signals per canonical URL. Spread over 30 filter variants, a category never ranks; and assistants may cite an odd filtered URL instead of the clean one.
How to check it yourself
- View source →
rel="canonical"on a product, a category, and a filtered category URL. The filtered page should point to the clean category.
How to fix it
- Enable canonical output in Rank Math/Yoast (on by default; check the theme does not strip
wp_head). - Add
Disallow: /*?orderby=and/*?filter_lines in robots.txt only if the parameters produce no unique content; otherwise rely on canonicals. - Keep paginated category pages self-canonical (page 2 → page 2), not pointing to page 1.