Faceted navigation: SEO best practices

You probably use it, sometimes without even realizing it, whether on e-commerce sites, restaurants, or even hotels: faceted navigation has become the norm, especially for large websites with very many pages.

The term may sound intimidating, but it’s simply a system that makes users’ lives easier by helping them refine a search using a series of filters to sort content.

While faceted navigation is very popular with both users and those who implement it, it can be tricky from an SEO perspective.

What is faceted navigation?

In detail, faceted navigation is a way to browse a website that helps you find what you’re looking for faster by using multiple filters based on the attributes of listings.

Here are some examples of sites where you encounter this type of filters:

On these sites, faceted navigation works by filtering category page lists according to their attributes. As mentioned, the lists will often be product features (size, material, color…), types of jobs or sought profiles (WordPress developer, graphic designer…), or hotel class, flight type, etc.

Once site administrators have determined which attributes seem relevant, the site displays those attributes to the user as a list:

When a user selects one or more filters, one of the following four things generally happens, depending on the site:

While the first two options offer a similar UX, the third option is different and is often chosen based on the likelihood that the user will apply more than one filter: if multiple filters are expected, it makes sense not to apply them immediately and to update the lists only after the set of filters is confirmed by clicking an “apply” button.

What happens then? At this stage, the URL can:

Faceted navigation and SEO

Because it improves UX and because Google places importance on UX, faceted navigation is considered a best practice.

It has many other SEO benefits, provided it is implemented correctly: if you don’t think things through before deploying such a system, you also risk seriously harming your SEO.

Indeed, faceted navigation, when poorly implemented, carries its share of problems:

Duplicate content

We refer to duplicate content when the same or similar content is accessible on multiple URLs. Filters are known to create URLs with duplicate content, filter pages being near-duplicates of the original page but with different listings.

Duplicate content causes problems including keyword cannibalization.

Index bloat

When search engines index pages on your site that have no search value, this is called "index bloat."

We just saw that faceted navigation can create millions of indexable URLs without unique content, but it can also create page variants that add no value to search engine indexes.

Take the Cdiscount example again: Would a user search directly in Google for a garden shed larger than 16m², made of aluminum, priced between €10 and €20? Obviously not.

But if your site indexes such pages even though they match no search intent, and they are low quality or—in this case—empty, your SEO will suffer a negative impact.

Wasted crawl budget

Google dedicates only a limited amount of resources to crawling your site. This is called crawl budget.

Some implementations of faceted navigation create an crawlable link for every available combination. Without repeating "index bloat", this means you potentially generate millions of URLs for Google to crawl, and you need to worry aboutoptimizing your crawl budget.

PageRank dilution

The PageRank is divided by the total number of links on the page.

This is an inherent problem with faceted navigation, because many filters generate numerous internal links: instead of PageRank being passed to important product (or category) pages, it will be passed to the links found in your filters, which will not help increase organic search traffic.

As you can see, many problems arise with faceted navigation, even though it solves others. Whether you have already implemented this feature on your site or are about to do so, it is essential to carry out an audit to determine which type of faceted navigation will suit you, your users, and, of course, Google best.

Faceted navigation: SEO best practices

Until now, we've mainly seen how faceted navigation complicates SEO, and can even be harmful. Fortunately, you can use faceted navigation as a way to get more traffic if you combine it with a long-tail keyword strategy.

Indeed, “faceted” URLs are ideal for capturing long-tail traffic, since facets create more specific versions of your pages.

1. Identify keywords and their long-tail variations

No need to explain again how to find and use long-tail keywords You are loyal readers and know that the topic has already been covered in the past on the Codeur.com blog 😊

2. Make these pages indexable

You must now ensure these pages can be crawled and indexed by Google. Depending on the type of faceted navigation you chose, you can do this in different ways.

Faceted navigation with internal link creation

If you implemented faceted navigation that creates internal links to each facet (which is not the ideal configuration...) you must make sure those URLs comply with the standard:

What you need to do depends on your situation; the important thing is that search engines can both crawl and index these pages.

Ajax faceted navigation

If you opted for “AJAX” faceted navigation, and therefore no specific internal links, you must create a subcategory page, since faceted navigation does not generate internal links (and thus cannot create those pages for you).

Most e-commerce platforms support creating subcategories, but ideally you want an extra feature that automatically assigns the subcategory’s products to a filtered version of the parent category, mainly to avoid managing each subcategory manually. That way you get the fast page generation benefits of faceted navigation while avoiding the SEO complications.

For example, if you want a subcategory “aluminum garden shed 16m²,” the ideal is to inherit the product lists from “garden sheds” and “aluminum” while only displaying products that also have the “16m²” attribute.

The main complications here concern setups where you select a facet page that isn’t subject to default indexing and crawling controls: technically, “faceted” pages are dynamic and are not the same as manually creating a subcategory.

A custom feature would be necessary to ensure that on-page optimizations are possible with faceted URLs. Hire a developer if needed!

3. Optimize URLs for search

We finish with an obvious point: the classic SEO optimizations, such as creating simple, readable URLs, and taking care with title tags, meta descriptions and other header tags. Use the opportunity to write unique content, and don’t forget to add these URLs to the XML sitemap.

Conclusion

And here’s how you can take advantage of faceted navigation.

Want to adopt this navigation system on your site? Hire a professional: they will optimize the browsing experience while taking care of your SEO. Describe your needs on Codeur.com to receive free quotes from freelance web developers (or use our faceted navigation to find your favorite freelancer 😉)