Faceted Navigation

When you visit an e-commerce website with thousands of products, you often see a sidebar with filters for things like color, size, or brand. This is called faceted navigation. It allows a user to select multiple filters at once to narrow down a huge list of products. Faceted navigation is a dream come true for shoppers because it helps them find what they’re looking for in just a few clicks.

However, when it comes to SEO, filters and faceted navigation can cause significant problems. The problem is that when a user applies a filter, a unique URL is created, but the content on that page is very similar to other pages. This can lead to a lot of SEO issues.

The Problem with SEO for Filters & Faceted Navigation

Filters are fantastic for user experience. Instead of a user having to look through a thousand products, they can get what they need in a few clicks. But faceted navigation creates a lot of pages that can hurt your SEO.

Duplicate Content

Faceted navigation creates many similar pages on different URLs. For example, a search for a red shirt and a blue shirt might both lead to a category page with almost identical content. This creates a duplicate content issue, where two pages on your website are competing with each other for the same keywords.

Wasted Crawl Budget

Faceted navigation can create millions of different pages, and a search engine needs to crawl all of them. If you have millions of pages that are all very similar, a search engine’s bots might get overwhelmed and not have enough time to crawl your most important pages. This is a huge waste of your crawl budget.

How to Fix SEO Issues for Filters and Faceted Navigation

Fortunately, you don’t have to choose between a good user experience and good SEO. You can have both!

Use the Right Canonical Tag

If you have a lot of pages that are very similar, you should use a canonical tag to point them to a single page that you want to rank. For example, if you have a page for a red shirt and a page for a blue shirt, you can use a canonical tag to point both of them to a category page.

Disallow Faceted URLs in robots.txt

The best way to ensure that a search engine doesn’t crawl your faceted pages is to add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This tells a search engine’s bots to skip over these pages. You should have a clear category URL structure, so you can prevent the crawl for multiple faceted options. 

Noindex Faceted Pages

If a search engine is still crawling your faceted pages, or if you don’t think they can ever rank, you can add a noindex tag to the page. This tells a search engine not to index the page. You should be careful to only noindex pages that you don’t want to rank, and you should remove any disallow rules from your robots.txt file.

How to Prevent Faceted Navigation SEO Issues

If you are building a new website, you can prevent faceted navigation SEO issues from the start.

Implement AJAX Faceted Navigation

AJAX faceted navigation is a modern approach that doesn’t reload the page when a user applies a new filter. This is a great way to prevent internal links from being created and to prevent your crawl budget from being wasted.

Prevent Internal Links to Faceted Pages

You should avoid adding internal links to faceted pages. These links can point a search engine to your faceted pages, which can result in a bloated index and a wasted crawl budget.

Customize Your AJAX Faceted Navigation

Since an AJAX page doesn’t reload, the URLs might not be unique. You can use URL parameters or hashes, so visitors can still access the unique filtered page. Because a search engine ignores the content after the hash (#), your SEO will be safe.

Turn a Faceted Page into a Unique Page

If a faceted page gets a lot of search traffic, you might want to turn it into a landing page. You should create a unique page with unique content, a unique URL, and specific testimonials. A professional SEO platform Clickrank can help you with this. The platform can help you with your on-page SEO, your technical issues, and your content, so you can build a strong website that ranks well.