When you visit a large online store, you often see a set of filters on the side of the page. You can filter products by things like color, size, or price. This is called faceted navigation, and it’s a great way for a user to find exactly what they are looking for.
For example, on an online store, a user might filter “Men’s Shoes → Black → Size 10 → Under $100.” This creates a unique URL with parameters (like ?color=black&size=10&price=under100). While this is great for user experience, it can cause a lot of problems for your SEO.
Why Are Faceted Navigation URLs a Problem for SEO?
- Crawl Waste: A search engine’s bots can crawl millions of different URL combinations that don’t add value. This is a huge waste of your crawl budget, which is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your website in a given period.
- Duplicate Content: Multiple URLs with the same or very similar content can confuse a search engine. This creates a duplicate content issue, where two pages on your website are competing with each other for the same keywords.
- Diluted Rankings: SEO signals, like backlinks, get split across duplicate pages. This can weaken both pages and prevent either one from ranking as high as it should.
How to Manage Crawling of Faceted Navigation URLs
1. Use Robots.txt to Block Unnecessary Parameters
If certain parameters don’t add value, you can disallow them in your robots.txt file. This tells a search engine’s bots to skip over these pages.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?sort=
Disallow: /*?view=2. Apply Canonical Tags
For pages with similar content, you should point them to the preferred version using a <link rel="canonical"> tag. This tells a search engine which page is the original.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/mens-shoes" />3. Use Parameter Handling in Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides a URL Parameters tool where you can tell Google how to treat certain parameters (e.g., “ignore color parameter”). It is, however, important to note that this feature has been deprecated for some sites in recent years, so you should rely mainly on robots.txt and canonicals.
4. Internal Linking Strategy
You should avoid linking to every faceted combination. Instead, you should link only to important, SEO-friendly filters, such as a category page for “Black Men’s Shoes.”
5. Noindex for Low-Value Facets
For pages that must exist but don’t provide unique value, you can add a noindex meta tag. This tells a search engine not to index the page. A professional SEO platform like Clickrank.ai can help you with this. The platform automatically crawls your website and provides a prioritized list of optimizations. This allows you to focus on high-level strategy while the platform takes care of the operational heavy lifting.
