Faceted Navigation: Best Practices For SEO via @sejournal, @natalieannhoben

When it comes to ample websites, specified arsenic ecommerce sites with thousands upon thousands of pages, the value of things similar crawl budget cannot beryllium understated.

Building a website with an organized architecture and astute internal linking strategy is cardinal for these types of sites.

However, doing that decently oftentimes involves caller challenges erstwhile trying to accommodate assorted attributes that are a communal taxable with ecommerce (sizes, colors, terms ranges, etc.).

Faceted navigation tin assistance lick these challenges connected ample websites.

However, faceted navigation indispensable beryllium good thought retired and executed decently truthful that some users and hunt motor bots stay happy.

What Is Faceted Navigation?

To begin, let’s dive into what faceted navigation really is.

Faceted navigation is, successful astir cases, located connected the sidebars of an e-commerce website and has aggregate categories, files, and facets.

It fundamentally allows radical to customize their hunt based connected what they are looking for connected the site.

For example, a visitant whitethorn privation a purple cardigan, successful a size medium, with achromatic trim.

Facets are indexed categories that assistance to constrictive down a accumulation listing and besides relation arsenic an hold of a site’s main categories.

Facets, successful their champion form, should ideally supply a unsocial worth for each enactment and, arsenic they are indexed, each 1 connected a tract should nonstop relevancy signals to hunt engines by making definite that each captious attributes look wrong the contented of the page.

Example of Facet Navigation from newegg.com, August 2024

Filters are utilized to benignant items with a listings page.

While the idiosyncratic tin usage this to constrictive down what they are looking for, the existent contented connected the leafage remains the same.

This tin perchance pb to aggregate URLs creating duplicate content, which is simply a interest for SEO.

There are a fewer imaginable issues that faceted navigation tin make that tin negatively impact SEO. The main 3 issues boil down to:

• Duplicate content.
• Wasted crawl budget.
• Diluted nexus equity.

The fig of highly related pieces of contented continues to turn significantly, and antithetic links whitethorn beryllium going to each of these antithetic versions of a page, which tin dilute nexus equity and frankincense impact the page’s ranking quality arsenic good arsenic make infinite crawl space.

You request to instrumentality definite steps to guarantee that hunt motor crawlers aren’t wasting invaluable crawl budgets connected pages that person small to nary value.

Canonicalization

Turning facet hunt pages into SEO-friendly canonical URLs for postulation landing pages is simply a communal SEO strategy.

For example, if you privation to people the keyword “gray t-shirts,” which is wide successful context, it would not beryllium perfect to absorption connected a azygous circumstantial t-shirt. Instead, the keyword should beryllium utilized connected a leafage that lists each disposable grey t-shirts. This tin beryllium achieved by turning facets into user-friendly URLs and canonicalizing them.

For example, Zalando’s facets are large examples wherever it uses facets arsenic postulation pages.

Screenshot from Zalando, August 2024

When you hunt successful Google [gray t-shirts] you tin spot Zalando’s facet leafage ranking successful the apical #10.

Screenshot from hunt for [gray t-shirts], Google, August 2024

If you effort to adhd different filter implicit a grey t-shirt, let’s accidental the marque sanction ‘Adidas,’ you volition get a caller SEO-friendly URL with canonical meta tags and due hreflangs for aggregate languages successful the root code

However, if you determine to see a transcript connected those pages, marque definite you alteration the H1 tag and transcript accordingly to debar keyword cannibalization.

Noindex

Noindex tags tin beryllium implemented to pass bots of which pages not to see successful the index.

For example, if you wished to see a leafage for “gray t-shirt” successful the index, but did not privation pages with terms filter in the index, past a noindex tag to the 2nd effect would exclude it.

For example, if you person terms filters that person these URLs…

…And if you don’t privation them to look successful the index, you tin usage the “noindex” meta robots tag successful the <head> tag:

This method tells hunt engines to “noindex” the leafage filtered by price.

Note that adjacent if this attack removes pages from the index, determination volition inactive beryllium crawl fund spent connected them if hunt motor bots find those links and crawl these pages. For optimizing crawl budget, utilizing robots.txt is the champion approach.

Robots.txt

Disallowing facet hunt pages via robots.txt is the champion mode to negociate crawl budget. To disallow pages with terms parameters, e.g. ‘/?price=50_100’, you tin usage the pursuing robots.txt rule.

Disallow: *price=*

This directive informs hunt engines not to crawl immoderate URL that includes the ‘price=’ parameter, frankincense optimizing the crawl budget by excluding these pages.

However, if immoderate outbound links pointing to immoderate URL with that parameter successful it existed, Google could inactive perchance index it. If the prime of those backlinks is high, you whitethorn see utilizing noindex and canonical attack to consolidate the nexus equity to a preferred URL.

Otherwise, you don’t request to interest astir that, arsenic Google confirmed they volition driblet implicit time.

Other Ways To Get The Most Out Of Faceted Navigation

• Implement pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” successful bid to radical indexing properties from pages to a bid arsenic a whole.
• Each leafage needs to nexus to children pages and parent. This tin beryllium done with breadcrumbs.
• Only usage canonical URLs successful sitemaps successful lawsuit you take to canonicalize your facets hunt pages.
• Include unsocial H1 tags and contented successful lawsuit of canonicalized facet URLs.
• Facets should ever beryllium presented successful a unified, logical mode (i.e., alphabetical order).
• Implement AJAX for filtering to let users to spot results without reloading the page. However ever alteration the URL aft filtering truthful users tin bookmark their searched pages and sojourn them later. Never instrumentality AJAX without changing the URL.
• Make definite faceted navigation is optimized for each devices, including mobile, done responsive design.

Conclusion

Although faceted navigation tin beryllium large for UX, it tin origin a multitude of problems for SEO.

Duplicate content, wasted crawl budget, and diluted nexus equity tin each origin terrible problems connected a site. However, you tin hole those issues by applying 1 of the strategies discussed successful this article.

It is important to cautiously program and instrumentality facet navigation successful bid to debar galore issues down the enactment erstwhile it comes to faceted navigation.

More resources:

• How To Optimize Website Architecture For SEO
• Ecommerce Marketing: The Definitive Guide 
• Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide

Featured Image: RSplaneta/Shutterstock

All screenshots taken by author