What Is Faceted Navigation And How Does It Affect SEO?

Story Based Question

Imagine you’re managing a large online clothing store that offers a wide variety of products. Customers can filter and refine their searches using several options, such as size, color, material, and price. You’ve recently noticed that some of your product pages aren’t showing up in search results as expected, despite having a large catalog of high-quality products. You wonder if your website’s filtering system is causing issues. What is faceted navigation, and how could it be affecting your SEO?

Exact Answer

Faceted navigation refers to the filtering system that allows users to narrow down their search results based on various categories, such as size, color, or price. While useful for users, faceted navigation can cause SEO issues like duplicate content, wasted crawl budget, and indexation problems if not properly managed.

Explanation

Faceted navigation is a common feature on large e-commerce websites, where customers can filter products by various attributes like size, color, brand, and more. While this enhances the user experience, it can create several SEO challenges if not handled correctly. Here’s how:

1. Duplicate Content:
   When users filter products by different categories, the same core product pages may be accessible through multiple URLs, each with different facets applied. For example, the page for a red shirt might be accessible at both www.store.com/red-shirts and www.store.com/red-shirts?size=m and www.store.com/red-shirts?price=low. These duplicate versions can confuse search engines, which may struggle to determine which version of the page to index, leading to duplicate content issues.
2. Wasted Crawl Budget:
   Search engines have a limited “crawl budget,” which refers to how many pages they are willing to crawl on your website. If search engines waste time crawling multiple filtered versions of the same page, they may not crawl your most important pages, like new product listings or high-converting pages. This reduces your site’s overall crawl efficiency and can harm SEO.
3. Indexation Problems:
   If not properly configured, faceted navigation pages can be indexed by search engines, leading to index bloat. When search engines index too many filtered pages, it could result in the wrong pages being shown in search results. This might hurt your rankings because search engines might end up showing irrelevant or low-value pages, rather than the main product pages.
4. Internal Linking Issues:
   Faceted navigation can also create internal linking issues, where links from category pages point to too many variations of the same page, creating a confusing link structure. This can lead to a dilution of link equity, as the search engines may have trouble understanding which page is the most important or authoritative.

Example

Let’s say you manage a large e-commerce store selling clothing. Your website features a filtering system that allows users to sort by various attributes, such as size, color, material, and price range. For example, a customer searching for red shirts might filter by size, resulting in URLs like:

• www.store.com/red-shirts?size=m
• www.store.com/red-shirts?size=l
• www.store.com/red-shirts?price=low
• www.store.com/red-shirts?price=high

Each of these filtered versions is essentially a separate page, but they all lead to the same red shirt product. This creates duplicate content issues, as search engines see these filtered URLs as different pages but with nearly identical content.

• Duplicate Content Issue:
  The search engine might struggle to determine whether to index www.store.com/red-shirts or the filtered pages, resulting in the dilution of ranking signals for the main product page.
• Crawl Budget Wastage:
  As search engines crawl each filtered version of the red shirt page, they waste valuable crawl budget on low-value pages. This means important pages, such as new arrivals or high-converting product pages, might not get crawled as frequently.

To prevent these issues, you could implement several strategies, such as:

• Noindex for Filtered Pages:
  Use the noindex meta tag on filtered pages to prevent search engines from indexing them. This ensures that only the main product pages are indexed.
• Canonical Tags:
  Add a canonical tag to filtered pages to indicate to search engines that the main product page should be considered the “canonical” version, preventing duplicate content issues.
• Faceted Navigation Configuration:
  Configure your faceted navigation to limit the number of filter combinations available to users. You can also use JavaScript to make filters work without generating new URLs, which can help reduce duplicate content and indexation problems.

By addressing these faceted navigation issues, you can ensure that search engines focus on indexing your most important pages, ultimately improving your site’s SEO performance.

Faceted navigation can improve user experience but creates SEO challenges like duplicate content, wasted crawl budget, and indexation problems. Properly managing it with techniques like noindex tags, canonical tags, and URL parameter management can help maintain SEO health and ensure your most important pages get the attention they deserve.