Wednesday, February 12, 2014

https://www.example.com/category.php?category=gummy-candies&price=5-10&price=over-10
Faceted navigation, such as filtering by color or price range, can be helpful for your visitors, but it's often not search-friendly since it creates many combinations of URLs with duplicative content. With duplicative URLs, search engines may not crawl new or updated unique content as quickly, and/or they may not index a page accurately because indexing signals are diluted between the duplicate versions. To reduce these issues and help faceted navigation sites become as search-friendly as possible, we'd like to:
- Provide background and potential issues with faceted navigation
- Highlight worst practices
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Share best practices
Background
In an ideal state, unique content—whether an individual product/article or a category of products/articles— would have only one accessible URL. This URL would have a clear click path, or route to the content from within the site, accessible by clicking from the home page or a category page.
Ideal for searchers and Google Search
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Clear path that reaches all individual product/article pages
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One representative URL for category page
https://www.example.com/category.php?category=gummy-candies
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One representative URL for individual product page
https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
Undesirable duplication caused with faceted navigation
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Numerous URLs for the same article/product
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Canonical:
example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
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Duplicate:
example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candies&price=5-10
The same product page for swedish fish can be available on multiple URLs.
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Numerous category pages that provide little or no value to searchers and search engines), as demontrated in the following table:
URL example.com/category.php?category=gummy-candies&taste=sour&price=5-10
example.com/category.php?category=gummy-candies&taste=sour&price=over-10