Faceted navigation best (and 5 of the worst) practices

It's been a while since we published this blog post. Some of the information may be outdated (for example, some images may be missing, and some links may not work anymore). Specifically, rel=prev/next is not supported anymore, and the URL parameter tool was deprecated.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Selecting filters with faceted navigation can cause many URL combinations, such as 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

• Share best practices

  • New faceted navigation implementations or redesigns
  • Existing faceted navigation implementations

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

• Clear path that reaches all individual product/article pages

  

• One representative URL for category page https://www.example.com/category.php?category=gummy-candies

  

• One representative URL for individual product page https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

  

Undesirable duplication caused with faceted navigation

• Numerous URLs for the same article/product

  • Canonical: example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

    

  • 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.

• 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