Google has updated its guidelines on faceted navigation by turning an old blog post into an official help document.
What started as a blog post in 2014 is now official technical documentation.
This change reflects the complexity of ecommerce and content-heavy websites, as many sites adopt advanced filtering systems for larger catalogs.
Faceted Navigation Issues
Ever used filters on an e-commerce site to narrow down products by size, color, and price?
That’s faceted navigation – the system allowing users to refine search results using multiple filters simultaneously.
While this feature is vital for users, it can create challenges for search engines, prompting Google to release new official documentation on managing these systems.
Modern Challenges
The challenge with faceted navigation lies in the mathematics of combinations: each additional filter option multiplies the potential URLs a search engine might need to crawl.
For example, a simple product page with options for size (5 choices), color (10 choices), and price range (6 ranges) could generate 300 unique URLs – for just one product.
According to Google Analyst Gary Illyes, this multiplication effect makes faceted navigation the leading cause of overcrawling issues reported by website owners.
The impact includes: