However, such an abundance of available filtering options should raise the question of what impact faceted navigation has on SEO. Each filter has its own unique URL, and there can be thousands, if not millions, of such addresses.
In fact, faceted navigation can present problems. What?
Duplication of internal content
Filtering subpages often inherit the meta title or description from the category page, causing harmful internal duplication. On the other hand, optimizing each filtering URL is usually pointless and very expensive.
Many subpages with so-called thin content will be created
Faceted navigation creates multiple URLs with very similar content. Search engines may consider these pages as duplicates, which will negatively affect their ranking.
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Wasting your browsing budget
Each combination of filters can create a unique URL, resulting in a huge number of pages to index. Search engines may have difficulty processing such a large number, which may affect the visibility of the entire page in search results.
A weakening link
A larger number of subpages causes weakening of internal and external linking.
" Some stores use dynamic filtering, without reloading the page (using AJAX technology) - this has a positive effect on the speed of product filtering, but from the SEO point of view it is not the best solution. Google robots have a problem with dynamically reading loaded content, which negatively affects the indexing of individual subpage," comments Marcin Depa, Harbingers SEO consultant. Marcin Depa
Optimizing faceted navigation for SEO
However, a well-prepared faceted navigation fulfills its role of convenience for the user and at the same time does not negatively affect the SEO of the website. As an SEO agency, we have participated in the implementation of this element many times and we can say that SEO-friendly faceted navigation is completely achievable.
Faceted navigation optimization for SEO should include the following elements:
Use canonical tags – Canonical tags tell crawlers which version of the page is the main one, helping to avoid duplicate content issues.
Management of parameters in URL addresses - if we plan to use URLs resulting from SEO filtering, it is worthwhile to ensure their readability. Many CMS systems have default solutions that generate complex URLs by adding strings of characters and numbers. It is worth making sure that the URL itself carries information about what is on the given subpage.
Limiting the indexing of irrelevant pages - some filters are desirable from the user's point of view (e.g. display method), but have no value for SEO. No one is simply searching for these types of phrases. In this case, it is worthwhile to limit the number of indexed filter subpages using the noindex tag or by blocking the indexing of the given filter in the robots.txt file.
Consistent internal linking structure – the introduction of faceted navigation means that internal linking can point to a much larger number of subpages. It is especially important to use consistent linking within the site.
Mobile Navigation Adaptation – It is extremely important now that faceted navigation is responsive and mobile friendly.
Nofollow attributes in faceted links - URL links with no SEO potential, especially those created by selecting 2 features of the same type (e.g. 2 different manufacturers), or those created after selecting a large number of features (e.g. more than 4 ) should be automatically marked with the nofollow attribute. This optimizes the crawl budget and reduces the number of unnecessary pages that may be retrieved by search engines.
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