When it comes to faceted navigation, users think of e-commerce sites, but it is also critical to use faceted navigation on advertising, travel and news sites. While faceted navigation can support your SEO performance, it can also create serious problems for your site if it is constructed incorrectly. Therefore, when determining the working principles of faceted navigation, filters that the user may need should be selected and technical issues such as crawlability should be taken into consideration.
Faceted navigation example for Amazon.com.tr:
How Does Faceted Navigation Work?
Faceted navigation generally works in 4 different ways:
The page is not reloaded and the results selected with javascript are reflected on the page.
The page will reload and the selected results will be reflected on the page. (Javascript not included)
When the user selects an item in the list, nothing happens until they click 'Apply' etc., after which the selected filter is reflected on the page using Javascript.
When the user selects an item in the list, nothing happens until they click 'Apply' etc., after which the new page is created. (JavaScript not included)
You need to review your products and services to decide which model is best for your site. For example, if you offer a type of product or service that users may want to apply multiple filters to, it would be more beneficial to present the user with the relevant page after all the filters have been selected.
You can test how faceted navigation works by using the “Network” tab in Chrome DevTools. If the resources on the page are reloaded, we can assume that js is not used in faceted navigation, and if the page resources are not reloaded, we can assume that js is used. For example, below we see that filtered pages on sahibinden.com are fetched using javascript. When we apply a filter for 1+1 apartments, the files on the page are not reloaded, the number of requests increases, and the filtered page is displayed to the user by loading new files.
Why Is Faceted Navigation Important?
As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, the main purpose of faceted navigation is to increase the user experience by allowing users to easily find the products they are looking for. Websites that use faceted navigation can create a simpler, more effective search process for website visitors and improve the user experience. This can result in lower bounce rates and more time spent on your site.
Faceted Navigation and URL Parameters
URL parameters can be used for many reasons such overseas chinese in uk data as site searches, pagination, session tracking. Faceted navigation is also directly related to the use of parameterized URLs. When the user selects any filter on the page, URLs will be generated according to the relevant filters.
For example, when we select the size filter on the women's dress page on trendyol.com, the URL generated is as follows.
https://www.trendyol.com/sr?wc=56&vr=beden|m
When we select size M and red color filter, the generated URL is as follows.
https://www.trendyol.com/sr?wc=56&wcl=7&vr=beden|m
As in the example, creating many filter options for all categories will also result in the creation of many parameterized URLs. This number can easily reach millions depending on the volume of the website. Therefore, in order not to experience any performance loss on the SEO side, some optimizations should be made for the URLs created as a result of faceted navigation.
What Kind of Problems Can Faceted Navigation Cause?
Faceted navigation can mainly cause the following problems.
Inefficient use of scanning budget
Duplication formation
Index swelling
1- Inefficient Use of Scanning Budget
Google may have limited resources available to crawl your pages, so optimizing your crawl budget should be at the top of your to-do list, especially if you have a medium or large website.
An increase in the number of parameterized URLs resulting from filtering can negatively affect the crawl budget and make it harder for Google to distinguish your important pages from less important ones. Therefore, you can disable the parameters that you think do not have SEO value from crawling through the robots.txt file and optimize the crawl budget.
2- Duplicate Content Creation
Filters will create a lot of duplicate URLs. Duplicate content leads to cannibalization and can cause similar pages to compete for the same queries. To prevent parameterized URLs from causing duplicate content issues, you can mark the parameterless versions of the URLs instead of marking them as self-canonical.
3- Index Bloat
Index bloat occurs when a large number of low-quality URLs are indexed. The inclusion of parameterized URLs resulting from faceted navigation not only causes inefficient use of the crawl budget, but also means that your low-quality, SEO-less pages are accessible in Google searches. This will create a bad experience for users. (Such as a filtered page with no products being indexed.)
How to Build SEO-Friendly Faceted Navigation?
We have touched on the problems you may encounter on your website when using faceted navigation. So, how should SEO-compatible faceted navigation be structured?
1- Use Canonical to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues
As I mentioned under the heading of duplicate content, you can use canonical tags to prevent your similar pages from competing in search results. Although Google does not comply with canonical tags 100%, it is a good idea to signal Google which URL it should index.
For example, let’s say you have an e-commerce site that sells textiles. Your dress category and your dresses page for 100-200 TL are very similar in content. Assuming that users are unlikely to search for dresses for 100-200 TL, the best case scenario here would be to mark the dresses page as the canonical for the dresses filter for 100-200 TL.
2- Use Standard URL Encoding on Filter Pages
According to the Faceted Navigation Best Practices content published by Google in 2014, non-standard URL coding can cause problems on the browser side, which can negatively affect SEO performance.
For example, using : instead of = and [ ] instead of & are among the worst-case scenarios according to Google.
3- Use Robots.txt File to Optimize Crawl Budget
If you are having problems with crawl budget on your site and have pages with many filters, the best scenario may be to block the filter pages via robots.txt.
For example, you can see below that the pages created as a result of the price filter on Trendyol are closed to crawling via robots.txt. For more detailed information about the robots.txt file, you can check out our What is the Robots.txt File? Why is it Important? content.
4- Use Noindex to Prevent Knee Swelling
If you do not want your filter pages to cause index bloat, you can prevent the pages from being indexed by adding a noindex tag to the pages. (With this option, you need to make sure that the pages are crawlable. Otherwise, Googlebot will not be able to see the noindex tag because it will not crawl your page.)
Use robots.txt blocking instead of noindex to use your crawl budget more efficiently. As you know, when using noindex, pages will continue to be crawled, they will just not be allowed to be indexed.
5- Use AJAX
By creating Faceted navigation with AJAX, you can ensure that your filter pages are created faster. When using AJAX, the resources on the page will not be reloaded after the filter selection, which will allow the user to reach the filtered results faster.
In addition to fast and optimized loading, there will be no problems with crawling and indexing your pages since there will be no internal links given with the a href tag on the page when using AJAX.
