When it comes to large websites, such as ecommerce sites with thousands upon thousands of pages, the importance of things like crawl budget cannot be understated.
Building a website with an organized architecture and smart internal linking strategy is key for these types of sites.
However, doing that properly oftentimes involves new challenges when trying to accommodate various attributes that are a common theme with ecommerce (sizes, colors, price ranges, etc.).
Faceted navigation can help solve these challenges on large websites.
However, faceted navigation must be well thought out and executed properly so that both users and search engine bots remain happy.
What Is Faceted Navigation?
To begin, let’s dive into what faceted navigation actually is.
Faceted navigation is, in most cases, located on the sidebars of an e-commerce website and has multiple categories, files, and facets.
It essentially allows people to customize their search based on what they are looking for on the site.
For example, a visitor may want a purple cardigan, in a size medium, with black trim.
Facets are indexed categories that help to narrow down a production listing and also function as an extension of a site’s main categories.
Facets, in their best form, should ideally provide a unique value for each selection and, as they are indexed, each one on a site should send relevancy signals to search engines by making sure that all critical attributes appear within the content of the page.
Example of Facet Navigation from newegg.com, August 2024
Filters are utilized to sort items with a listings page.
While the user can use this to narrow down what they are looking for, the actual content on the page remains the same.
This can potentially lead to multiple URLs creating duplicate content, which is a concern for SEO.
There are a few potential issues that faceted navigation can create that can negatively affect SEO. The main three issues boil down to:
Duplicate content.
Wasted crawl budget.
Diluted link equity.
The number of highly related pieces of content continues to grow significantly, and different links may be going to all of these different versions of a page, which can dilute link equity and thus affect the page’s ranking ability as well as create infinite crawl space.
You need to take certain steps to ensure that search engine crawlers aren’t wasting valuable crawl budgets on pages that have little to no value.
Canonicalization
Turning facet search pages into SEO-friendly canonical URLs for collection landing pages is a common SEO strategy.
For example, if you want to target the keyword “gray t-shirts,” which is broad in context, it would not be ideal to focus on a single specific t-shirt. Instead, the keyword should be used on a page that lists all available gray t-shirts. This can be achieved by turning facets into user-friendly URLs and canonicalizing them.
For example, Zalando’s facets are great examples where it uses facets as collection pages.