If I'm not mistaken the best way to do this would be to add two different controller methods and map them to two different Urls.
public ActionResult Filter1(string criteria1);
public ActionResult Filter2(string criteria1, criteria2);
Then you have two route definitions:
This will map this URL List/Filter/xxCriteria/ to the first controller
routes.MapRoute(
"Filter", // Route name
"{controller}/Filter/{criteria1}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "List", action = "Filter1", criteria="" } // Parameter defaults
);
This will map this URL List/Filter/xxCriteriaName/xxxCriteriaRank to the second controller. Without this route you could still map a url to the second method, but it would look like : List/Filter/?criteria1=xx&criteria2=xx
routes.MapRoute(
"Filter2", // Route name
"{controller}/Filter/{criteria1}/{criteria2}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "List", action = "Filter2", criteria1 = "", criteria2 = "" } // Parameter defaults
);
Hope it helped.