How does Google feel about it?
Because of this astronomical figure, faceted navigation is the most user-friendly alternative for customers. It is also the most practical option for ecommerce teams. Building page after page, putting the user through click after click on a difficult journey with no end in sight, simply does not make sense.
And this is where we come upon an SEO anomaly, one of the rare cases where good user experience may contradict good SEO. Google continues to favor user experience and faceted navigation. However, the potential concerns raised by faceted navigation are significant enough that Google released a comprehensive warning about them.
Important Points
Avoid faceted search SEO concerns by using canonical tags, constructing URLs that Google can comprehend, and ensuring that Google only crawls priority pages.
If you manage Ecommerce SEO for a large enterprise site, you most likely use a faceted search system. From the standpoint of the user, these handy sort and filter options are a big value. However, they are well-known in the SEO field for causing a slew of problems. If left to its own devices, a faceted navigation system will generate possibly millions of pages of duplicate content, similar to a magical photocopier that won't switch off.
Here's how to keep your website's faceted navigation under control without compromising any of its benefits.
Filters vs. facets
What is the distinction between facets and filters? People frequently mix up facets and filters because they both assist searchers in narrowing down a huge list of objects. But here's the catch:
Filters are applied at the global level, and the set of filtering options remains constant independent of previous selections.
Faceted navigation is unique. Each choice yields a subcategory of new options (facets) that may differ depending on the preceding choice. More significantly, aspects are not used consistently. If you are looking for red shirts,you may use a mens clothing filter or a long sleeve facet.
When used for ecommerce, faceted navigation provides the user with numerous filtering choices for sorting through various product attributes and narrowing their search to the specific type of product they require. This is especially useful for sites with vast product catalogues, clothing stores, and any other situation where searchers may sort by product features that do not justify their own category.
For example, a user looking for shoes could filter by a variety of factors such as colour, material, size, style, and price range. So, if they are seeking for green leather sandals in a size 7 for less than $200, faceted navigation will bring them to a product list that meets that condition. Green sandals or siize 7 sandals do not deserve their own category or subcategory page, let alone size 7 green sandals.
Faceted navigation is thus an elegant method of addressing a diverse range of user preferences. It's significantly more elegant than, example, generating a practically unlimited number of landing pages and figuring out how to navigate between them.
Examples of faceted navigation
Examples of faceted searches may be found on practically any major ecommerce site (think Amazon). Let's take a look at Target's user interface. If you are looking for men's t-shirts and arrive to Target's home page, you can travel the following path without ever leaving the primary navigation system:
Instead than overwhelming the user with options or forcing them to filter the field down further before they are ready, the primary navigational journey ends there.
A sleek faceted navigation design on the Basic Tees page allows the user to filter the list of basic tees by the following qualities:
That's nine more traits ten if you count out-of-stock items. All of the various combinations of these features result in tens of thousands of different copies of one single page.
To put it another way, if you filter by your list of desired traits, you will arrive at:
That is one of thousands of possible outcomes. All within the scope of a single sub-category of a sub-category.
SEO issues with faceted navigation
When we used the faceted navigation on Target's Basic Tees page and arrived at a final list of filtered results, our end URL looked something like this:
Faceted navigation systems generate a new URL for each filtered search. They will either dynamically generate the URL, resulting in something similar to the one seen in our example. Alternatively, they will append parameters that describe how the category URL should behave (more on this later). That is, even if you are not constructing new landing pages for every possible combination of attributes, your faceted navigation is producing them as they occur.
If left unchecked, faceted search might cause your site to become overrun with duplicate content. It has the potential to deprive high-priority pages of crawl budget and link equality. This is easier to understand if you see crawling as a resource rather than an action.
The most common faceted navigation SEO errors occur when you fail to anticipate and correct dynamically created unique urls. They can be divided into two major categories:
The appearance and behaviour of your URLs
URLs are encoded with a language that tells crawlers where the page is in your website architecture. It also instructs spiders such as Googlebot on how to comprehend what is happening on the page. URLs with incorrect file locations or that are not encoded with the correct parameters can cause search engines to become confused. As a result, your crawl budget may be squandered. Worse even, the duplicate page may be indexed. When we look at the best practises for URLs, we'll go into greater detail about this.
How you handle duplicate content
How do you prevent search engines from crawling and indexing duplicate pages created by faceted navigation? How can you ensure that the operation is carried out automatically with the creation of each duplicate?
Fortunately, there are several dependable methods for preventing your faceted navigation system from generating SEO issues.
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SEO recommended practises for faceted navigation
These improvements are so dependable that if you use an out-of-the-box faceted search integration or ecommerce platform, the best practises are almost certainly embedded into the system.
But what if you use custom development to tweak your existing system or design a new one from the ground up? We'll walk you through the best approach to perform faceted navigation so you don't end up with the dreaded duplicate content monster.
Read more: Is thin content harming your SEO?
1. Begin crawling
When you create duplicate content, search engines crawl it, recognise it as duplicate content, and refuse to index it. This adds bloat to your site and draws crawl without benefiting your organic presence in any manner, thus lowering the authority for the sites that should be crawled. The first step in resolving this problem with ecommerce sites is identifying it in the first place.
A skewed indexing ratio in Google Search Console is a red flag that you may have duplicate content concerns. If the number of pages indexed for your site greatly outnumbers the number of pages crawled/submitted, there is an issue somewhere, and duplicate content is the most likely culprit. If this is the case, one of your first suspects should be faceted search.
Learn how to develop an SEO-friendly content plan!
However, the only way to really assess the scope of the problem is to perform a web crawl with Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, or your preferred crawling tool. A comprehensive crawl will return a list of all URLs on your site as well as any duplicates. It will also detect canonical problems and allow you to specify URL parameters that will allow you to focus specifically on your faceted search category pages.
2. Check to see if the pages are searchable.
We just explained why it is a problem when Google crawls but does not index your material. It's a completely different issue when Google crawls and then indexes the duplicate pages. This results in a terrible search experience for the visitor and, as a result, a negative influence on your site's authority.
Run a site:search for any of your category pages to check for this. There is a problem if the search results produce a big list of indexed pages.
You may also simply Google a few of the URLs returned by your faceted search. They are indexed if they appear in the search results. Instead, you should see something like this:
3. Set canonical tags
Once you've identified the issue, go through a sequence of best practises to construct your solution. First and foremost, examine the website's canonical tags. In an ecommerce website, every URL created by faceted search should canonicalize to the desired version of the page. In this scenario, the favoured version will be the ecommerce category page from where the search began.
So, in our Target example, our narrowed search resulted in the following URL:
Target isn't worried about the URL because a simple look at their source code reveals that they're canonicalizing to the Basic Tees page:
You are not required to take any further action.
What about pagination, though? It should be noted that Google no longer supports rel next and rel prev. They do, however, encourage employing pagination if it improves the user experience.
4. Set up the URLs.
A dynamically created URL is usually the result of a filtered search. However, employing the sort feature will result in a URL that tells a narrative. This type of URL frequently includes file paths to directories, indicating the page's position in the site architecture. They can be encoded in a language that allows search engines to understand what is happening on the new page. Here's how to adhere to best practises:
Stick to standard encoding
All key=value pairs should be preceded by a = sign, not a comma. Add an ampersand to the end of a list of parameters. Use no brackets or other non-standard characters. When we return to Target's Basic Tees page and sort by price, our URL will look like this:
That URL indicates that we've entered the Basic Tees category and are currently sorting by price from low to high.
Don't put variables like session id in the file path
The file path or directory of a URL acts as a breadcrumb for search engines. Actually, it's also for humans. If a user has gone too far into a subcategory and want to return to the upper category, they will frequently manually change the URL by eliminating the URL parameters. For example, in the example below, I can return to the higher category by deleting anything after the question mark:
So, if a user creates a new session id and you change the file path to include that session id, you're going to have a massive problem on your hands that can result in infinitely more URLs. Target is adhering to best practises in this regard, hence they did not do so. But, if they did, it might look like this:
The session id in this case is s1489. And it's in the file path rather than appended as a parameter.
Session ids aren't the only variables to think about. Anything that does not modify page content, such as tracking ids, referrer ids, and timestamps, does not belong in the file path.
5. Use the robots meta tag or the X-robots-tag to block access.
If faceted search generates URL parameters that you do not want search engines or web crawlers to index, you can use a robots meta tag to prevent them from being indexed. Simply add the following noindex tag to your page's head section:
Search engines will be unable to index those pages as a result of this. You can even configure the tag to just allow specific crawlers, such as Googlebot. It will, however, do little to free up crawl budget or maintain link equity. If you want to do that, you must additionally include a nofollow tag, such as this:
While this is an excellent solution for single URLs, it is not very scalable. You will need to utilize an X-robots-tag if you have hundreds (or thousands) of ecommerce product pages.
Assume, for example, that your faceted search results are always displayed after the directives /filter/ or /sort/ in your URL. All you'd have to do in that case is use the x-robots meta tag to disable /sort/ or /filter/. Because this directive supports regular expressions (regex), you can prevent crawling and indexation of multiple parameters or directories.
Previously, webmasters did this with a robots.txt file. It is crucial to note, however, that Google no longer accepts robots.txt files with the noindex directive as of September 1, 2019.
WARNING: For this to work, your URLs must be flawless and consistent. Otherwise, you may inadvertently block crucial pages. Alternatively, you may fail to detect all instances of duplication. Furthermore, it does not guarantee that your page will not be indexed.
6. NOFOLLOW internal links
Assume you work for Target and decide to publish a blog article about how men may show their support during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Instead of emphasising specific products, you link to a comprehensive list of pink t-shirts generated by your handy dandy filter:
When you use a filter in this manner for any internal link on the site, nofollow that link. This prevents crawlers from discovering extraneous URLs, diverting crawl bandwidth and link equity away from the core of your site.
Google also just added two new link attributes: rel= sponsored and rel=ugc. These can assist Google in distinguishing between your priority pages and other content such as comments and sponsored posts. Using one or more of these tags can assist in directing Google to the pages that truly matter.
7. Take into account the users.
Last but not least, think like a user. Always, always, always think like a user. What is the simplest answer for them? In your haste to adhere to stringent best practises, have you unintentionally eliminated sites that people would genuinely look for? This will not be the case with properties such as size. However, for filters such as brand or style, it very well may be. If this is the case, it might have a significant influence on online sales.
Learn how to do keyword research like a boss so you can be aware of search volumes for questions connected to certain product qualities.
Target, for example, undoubtedly discovered a fairly significant search volume for mens graphic t shirts. So, rather than adding it as a style element in one of their other T-shirt categories, they separated it out and created graphic tees into a separate category. This helps them to acquire search traffic for graphic tees and provide a better customer experience.
Consider whether one of your faceted attributes should be on a static landing page if it has a large search traffic or can be filtered further (graphic tees can be filtered by trend). Make the necessary modifications.
Also, configure your faceted navigation to make the user's life easier. Add breadcrumbs to each page so the user may simply return to their previous location. Check for speed and operation twice. Examine the smartphone functionality and aesthetics. Also, do not provide customers the option of selecting criteria that will not return any products.
Check your faceted navigation for faults on a regular basis and prioritise fixes. You will please both users and search engines without sacrificing one for the other. Build these processes into your system, and you'll be anticipating and resolving problems faster than you can get a new T-shirt.