Faceted Navigation – SEO Problems and Best Practices

Faceted navigation enhances user experience by making it easier to find relevant content or products quickly. However, if not implemented correctly, this UX technique can create major SEO issues.

In this article, we’ll highlight the SEO problems associated with faceted navigation. We’ll also share best practices to help you optimise its implementation for both users and search engines.

What Are the SEO Issues with Faceted Navigation?

Faceted navigation can create a bunch of SEO issues, but they come down to two main problems: wasting valuable resources and affecting the performance of your key pages. Breaking it down, faceted navigation can lead to the following SEO problems:

• Duplicate content
• Crawl budget wastage
• Index bloat
• Dilution of PageRank

We’ll break down each issue in detail below.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content occurs when the same or similar content is available across multiple URLs. Filters are a common culprit, often creating numerous pages that are nearly identical, such as those filtered by colour, size, or price.

Although duplicate content isn’t a direct negative ranking signal (John Mueller says so), it can still harm SEO. It leads to keyword cannibalisation and dilutes ranking signals by spreading link equity across multiple URLs instead of strengthening a single page.

Crawl budget wastage

As you know, faceted navigation generates multiple URL variations, such as pages filtered by size, colour, or price. If not managed properly, search engines may spend their limited crawl budget on these low-value pages.

What does this mean? Your important pages, like product or category pages, might not get crawled or updated as often, which can hurt their visibility in search results. Over time, this can reduce your site’s overall SEO performance.

Index bloat

As we mentioned earlier, faceted navigation creates hundreds or even thousands of filtered URL combinations. When search engines index too many of these low-value or unnecessary pages, it results in index bloat or index clutter.

Index bloat impacts your site in two key ways. First, it leads to overuse of crawl budget. Second, having low-quality pages indexed can harm Google’s overall perception of your site. John Mueller explains this in this video.

Dilution of PageRank

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google to rank websites in search results. It works by looking at the number and quality of links pointing to a page, based on the idea that important web pages get more links.

If you handle faceted navigation in the wrong way, your PageRank will be distributed among all faceted pages. This results in less link equity flowing to your most important pages, making it harder for them to rank well in search results.

For example, let’s say you have a product page for “Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 40 running shoes.” Ideally, this single page should get all the link equity from incoming links.

But with faceted navigation, you might end up with multiple URLs for the same product, such as pages filtered by size (nike-air-zoom-pegasus-40-size-10) or colour (nike-air-zoom-pegasus-40-red).

Instead of strengthening the main page, the PageRank gets spread across these variations, reducing its overall SEO power.

What Are the Best Practices for Faceted Navigation?

The best approach for managing faceted navigation depends on whether you want the faceted URLs to be crawlable and indexable or not. Generally, you’ll want to index facets with high search volume and block the rest to avoid SEO issues.

If you don’t want faceted pages indexed

For facets with low search volume, it’s better to block them from being crawled and indexed. Here’s how you can do that:

• Manage crawling with Robots.txt: Use this to disallow crawling of faceted pages. However, remember that blocked pages can still be indexed if they’re linked elsewhere, so avoid interlinking them.
• Apply Canonical tags: Tag the main category pages as canonical URLs and point faceted pages to their parent pages. This helps consolidate link equity and avoid indexing problems, though Google treats canonical tags as hints, not directives.
• Add noindex tags: This directive ensures faceted pages won’t be indexed but doesn’t stop them from being crawled, which can still waste crawl budget.
• Consider AJAX navigation: A practical solution to avoid faceted URLs entirely. With AJAX, new listings are generated without reloading the page, eliminating faceted URLs altogether.

If you want faceted pages indexed

For facets with high search volume, leaving them crawlable and indexable can help you capture more organic traffic. However, these pages need to be optimised properly:

• Write unique meta titles and descriptions for each indexed page.
• Add unique content targeting relevant long-tail keywords.
• Include the URLs in your XML sitemap for easier discovery.
• Ensure your hosting server can handle the additional crawl requests to avoid performance issues.

By carefully deciding which faceted pages to index and optimising them when needed, you can strike a balance between improving SEO performance and managing resources effectively.

How to Prevent Faceted Navigation Issues in the First Place

The best way to deal with faceted navigation issues is to prevent them from happening altogether. Proper planning and implementation can save you from dealing with duplicate content, crawl budget waste, and index bloat.

Here’s how you can get ahead of the problem:

Use AJAX and Avoid Internal Links

AJAX is a great way to manage faceted navigation without creating separate URLs for every filter. It dynamically updates page content as users apply filters, eliminating the need for additional URLs that can clutter search engine indexes.

Additionally, ensure faceted URLs are not internally linked anywhere on your site. Search engines follow internal links, so linking to these pages can result in unnecessary crawling and indexing. Keep your internal linking structure clean, focusing only on the important pages.

Ensure URLs Are Shareable

Even when using AJAX, making filtered pages shareable is crucial for a seamless user experience. The best way to achieve this is by using URL hashes (e.g., example.com/products#size=large).

Google ignores everything after the hash in a URL, which means these variations won’t be crawled or indexed, avoiding SEO issues like duplicate content or crawl budget waste. At the same time, users can still share and access the filtered content easily.

Wrapping Up

Faceted navigation isn’t necessarily bad for SEO. When done correctly and strategically, it can improve the user experience and drive valuable organic traffic.

However, if not done correctly, faceted navigation can harm SEO by wasting crawl budget, creating duplicate content, and diluting ranking signals.

Follow the best practices mentioned in this article, and you’ll be fine. To take it a step further, we recommend doing an SEO audit to identify and address any lingering issues.