SEO for search/filtered result pages

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Dave Elliott: The wonderful Maria wrote this about faceted navigation. Tis a really good guide https://builtvisible.com/faceted-navigation-seo-best.../
  
  Basically the big issue is making sure that only things with genuine SEO value are indexable and that you prevent lots of near duplicate URLs being crawled and indexed.
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: I disagree with most of the "duplicate content issues" things. If it`s truly duplicate (i.e. two variation combinations bring up the same exact list of products) it`s time to rethink your attribute choices - not block it from search engines. If it`s not a useful page for a search engine to index, it`s likely not a useful page for your visitors either.
  
  Those combinations of facets (and the resulting list of products that meet that criteria) are your landing pages for the long stem keywords which don`t resolve to a single product. For example... "2br, 1 1/2 bath, Queens" should bring me to a page that lists all of the relevant homes/apartments for my real estate/rentals site. If I were to change or omit any one of those, I would be getting a different set of results.
  
  Where you DO need to consider which of these paths you want the spiders to crawl is when you`re up against a crawl budget. If you have so many items and facets that you`ve got more than say 15-20k pages - you need to consider throttling some areas (unless you can get your site`s PR/DR/Whatever up high enough that Google will increase your budget). If the total pages is up near 4-5k - you also want some sort of method to guide Google to new listings and some of those filter pages that have a lot of new changes going on. Having a "What`s New" list on the home page or adding blog posts that highlight things that have been added this week are two (of many) ways you can accomplish this.
  
  Remember, the filter listings pages are archive pages. If your theme is following proper web standards, even having two pages that DO output the exact same listings isn`t really duplicate content. That page isn`t there to show Google content (by the time a user clicks the link in Google, those pages have usually changed anyway). That page is there to show the relationship and commonalities between the listings that appear. The search terms which bring up any of those pages shouldn`t be something that keys into any one product - but rather the attributes that have been selected.
  
  The "link dilution" and some of the other things described in that article really only happen if you have things in your filter that are worthless or don`t really change anything. If that`s the case - they shouldn`t be there at all. If they aren`t there at all, then you don`t have to worry about keeping the spiders out.
  
  NOTE: If results pages are paginated... I would consider limiting spider hits to just the first page. In most cases - even in normal situations like general blog archives, etc - the listings themselves aren`t important. If Google is sending you to a page that isn`t page one - it`s because two articles on the page happen to blend together and match the query - and that`s rarely a good result since it`s two separate articles that can`t possibly provide one solution. If they did - then they`d be grouped together in some other way (via linking or tags or whatever) that matches that relationship. Plus, even those are bad matches - when a user finally clicks that link to page 3 of some archive, the articles in question are usually now on page 4 or 5 - so the user can`t find them anyway.
  
  All that said - the strategy above won`t hurt your rankings all that much - it`s just that if I`m your competition and we`re going head-to-head - my method, if done properly, will kick that method`s butt.