Crawling December: Faceted Navigation

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

We conscionable published a caller archive astir faceted navigation champion practices, which was primitively published arsenic a blog post. This is simply a summary of immoderate of nan important parts of nan caller archiving page.

Faceted navigation is simply a awesome measurement to thief users find what they petition connected your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it tin make a near-infinite number of URLs, starring to:

• Overcrawling: Search engines discarded clip crawling countless URLs that aren't valuable to hunt users.
• Slower discovery: This overcrawling slows down nan find of your important, caller content.

In fact, faceted navigation is by acold nan astir communal guidelines of overcrawl issues tract owners study to us, and successful nan immense mostly of nan cases nan rumor could've been avoided by following immoderate champion practices. But let's backmost up a little.

The problem pinch URLs

Each prime cognition successful a faceted navigation mostly creates a unsocial URL. For example:

https://example.com/items.shtm?products=fish&color=radioactive_green&size=tiny

Changing immoderate parameter — product, color, aliases size — creates a caller URL, starring to a imaginable detonation of URLs. And that's nan problem: a virtually infinite number of caller URLs waiting to beryllium discovered. Let's spread it.

Two approaches

1. Block faceted navigation URLs:
   • If you don't petition these URLs indexed, usage robots.txt to disallow crawling.
   • Or usage URL fragments (#) for filters, arsenic hunt engines mostly disregard them.
2. Optimize faceted navigation URLs (if you petition them crawled, nary matter nan cost):
   • Use nan modular & separator for URL parameters. 💩 is not a bully parameter separator character.
   • Maintain a accordant bid of filters successful nan URL path.
   • Return a 404 position codification for prime combinations pinch nary results.
   • Unless you personification nary different options (for example, you personification a single-page app), debar redirecting quiet results to a generic "not found" page.

Important considerations

• You tin too usage rel="canonical" to thief consolidate signals by pointing variations to a main page. This 1 takes clip to get picked up.
• rel="nofollow" connected prime links tin discourage crawling, but must beryllium applied consistently. As in, each nexus pointing to these pages, psyche and external, must personification a rel="nofollow" attribute.
• Crawling faceted navigation URLs will ever devour server resources and whitethorn effect the find of caller content.

If you personification suggestions aliases petition mentation astir our caller archive astir faceted navigation champion practices, usage nan feedback instrumentality connected that doc. If you are really into faceted navigation and wanna chat about it pinch others, the Search Central organization is nan place to go, but you tin too find america on LinkedIn.

Posted by Gary Illyes