Well following on from Dr Petes timely blog i have done the following:
For all faceted navigation by color I have added noindex,follow meta tags to remove these pages- i also removed the rel canonical tag from these pages as I was not sure that having a noindex and pointing to a vanilla category page as the canonical version was too clever.
I have modified my rel canonical to point to the correct page for all paginated pages.
Assuming the above is better than my previous state of affairs how can i solve the following?
My main category navigation has faceted filter by color links for each category. Tnis adds around 100 extra links on each page sitewide. How can i reduce the negative impact of having so many links in my global nav short of removing them? Can in use some sort of javascript to perform the navigation?
Thanks