Title: Optimizing Faceted Navigation for Large Ecommerce Sites: Strategies to Avoid SEO Challenges

When it comes to large websites, such as ecommerce sites with a vast number of pages, the significance of aspects like crawl budget cannot be overstated. Constructing a website with an organized structure and an intelligent internal linking strategy is essential for these types of sites.

However, achieving this often involves overcoming new challenges, particularly when incorporating various attributes common to ecommerce, such as sizes, colors, and price ranges. Faceted navigation can address these challenges on large websites.

It is crucial to plan and implement faceted navigation carefully to ensure satisfaction for both users and search engine bots.

What Is Faceted Navigation?

Faceted navigation is typically located in the sidebars of an e-commerce website, featuring multiple categories, files, and facets. It allows users to refine their searches based on specific criteria they are looking for on the site. For example, a user may be searching for a purple cardigan, in a size medium, with black trim.

Facets are indexed categories that narrow down a product listing and act as an extension of a site’s main categories. In their best form, facets should provide unique value for each selection. Each should send relevancy signals to search engines by ensuring that all critical attributes appear within the page’s content.

Filters are used to sort items on a listings page. While users can narrow down their search preferences, the actual page content remains unchanged. This can potentially result in multiple URLs creating duplicate content, which poses a concern for SEO.

There are a few potential issues that faceted navigation can create that may negatively impact SEO. The three main issues are:

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

The volume of related content may grow significantly, with different links directing to various versions of a page. This can dilute link equity, affecting a page’s ranking ability, and create infinite crawl space. It’s important to take certain steps to ensure search engine crawlers do not waste valuable crawl budgets on pages with little to no value.

Canonicalization

A common SEO strategy involves turning facet search pages into SEO-friendly canonical URLs for collection landing pages. For example, if targeting the keyword “gray t-shirts,” it’s advisable to use a page listing all available gray t-shirts rather than focusing on a single t-shirt. This can be done by turning facets into user-friendly URLs and canonicalizing them.

This approach involves using facets as collection pages, like Zalando’s facets, which illustrate this practice effectively.

When searching on Google for [gray t-shirts], you may see Zalando’s facet page ranking among the top results.

If you add another filter to a gray t-shirt, say a brand name like ‘Adidas,’ you will get a new SEO-friendly URL with canonical meta tags and appropriate hreflangs for multiple languages in the source code.

Ensure any included copy on these pages changes the H1 tag and content accordingly to avoid keyword cannibalization.

Noindex

Noindex tags can be employed to indicate which pages bots should exclude from the index. For instance, if a “gray t-shirt” page is to be indexed, but pages with a price filter should not, applying a noindex tag to the latter will exclude it.

For example, if you have price filters with URLs like:

/t-shirts/grey/?price_from=82

…and do not want them indexed, apply the “noindex” meta robots tag to the page. This tells search engines to exclude the page filtered by price.

Even if pages are removed from the index, crawl budget might still be spent if bots find and crawl these links. For optimizing crawl budgets, using robots.txt is the preferred method.

Robots.txt

Disallowing facet search pages via robots.txt is effective for managing crawl budgets. To prevent crawling of pages with price parameters, like ‘/?price=50_100’, use this robots.txt rule:

Disallow: *price=*

This directive instructs search engines not to crawl URLs with the ‘price=’ parameter, optimizing crawl budgets by excluding these pages.

If there are high-quality backlinks to URLs with the parameter, consider using canonical methods to concentrate link equity to a preferred URL. Otherwise, Google has confirmed those links will drop over time.

Other Ways To Optimize Faceted Navigation

• Implement pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" to group indexing properties.
• Every page should link both to children pages and parent pages, achievable with breadcrumbs.
• Only use canonical URLs in sitemaps if facets search pages are canonicalized.
• Include unique H1 tags and content for canonicalized facet URLs.
• Facets should be displayed in a logical order, such as alphabetical.
• Implement AJAX for filtering, allowing users to see results without page reload. Change URLs after filtering so users can bookmark and revisit these pages. Avoid implementing AJAX without changing URLs.
• Ensure faceted navigation is optimized for mobile and all devices through responsive design.

Conclusion

While faceted navigation can enhance user experience, it can also lead to several SEO challenges. Issues like duplicate content, wasted crawl budget, and diluted link equity can be significant but can be addressed with the strategies outlined in this article.

It is essential to plan and implement facet navigation carefully to prevent future issues related to faceted navigation.

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*Featured Image: RSplaneta/Shutterstock

All screenshots taken by the author.*