Implement faceted navigation correctly and you’ll be ranking for long-tail keyword after long-tail keyword. One mis-step and you could lead yourself to SEO disaster. 

So what is faceted navigation, how can you use it to benefit your ecommerce website, what are the main factors to consider for SEO and how do you know if you’re doing on the right track or not? I’ll explain all of these things, but first…

What is Faceted Navigation?

If you’ve ever shopped online then the chances are you’ve sorted and filtered products by price, size, colour, material and more. These sorting and filtering options help your customers find products that they’re looking for. For example Nike, Macy’s, Adidas, Amazon, Wayfair all use faceted navigation. 

However, faceted navigation isn’t limited to ecommerce websites.

Publishers, realtors, travel hubs and job listing sites can also use this type of navigation to improve user experience.

As well as improving user experience, faceted navigation can help websites create pages that can target specific long-tail queries – the last part of that secentce is why faceted navigation is so important for SEO.

How Can Faceted Navigation Help Websites Rank For Long Tail Queries?

How Does Faceted Navigation Cause Problems for SEO? 

How Do I Know If My Site Is Experiencing Problems With Faceted Navigation? 

There’s multiple ways, I’ll talk about free methods and paid methods. 

#1 Use Google Search Console’s Performance Report

One of the best ways to identify issues is by using Google Search Console. For your chosen date range head over to the queries tab. 

If you have a query that can be found via more than one page, click on it. Then head over to the pages tab. 

If your search console report shows multiple pages that are ranking for the query, then there’s an issue. In the example below you can see that three different pages are ranking for a particular query – the homepage and two different product category pages. 

#2 Use Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats Report

This is a view that underutilized in the SEO industry. It’s one of my favourite sections of Search Console. 

While working on large websites in the past, i’ve made use of log file analysis but Google Search Console actually provides you with something similar, that’s called a crawl stats report. 

This report shows you stats around Google’s crawling history for your website. You will be able to see what resources and pages Google bot is crawling the most often. 

When you’re in the report you can URLs crawled by response, filetype, purpose and googlebot type. Let’s saw we want to view crawl request by HTML.

We’ll now see a list of HTML URLs that Googlebot crawls – if you notice that the majority of these are facet pages that are similar to each other then you know you have an issue. 

For SEO’s that work on large websites, you can also look at the ratio of refresh and discovery. If you have a giant website, and you see that discovery is higher than refresh, click on discovery. 

Examine the URLs, if the majority of those are facets then again, you’ve encountered a problem with faceted navigation. 

#3 Use A Paid SEO Tool

Okay so no one is paying me to review their tools, so I’ll plug-in one that I think is useful. Ahrefs have a pretty neat way of quickly showing you duplicate content on your website. 

Plug-in your websites URL, click on organic keywords and then turn on the option which states “multiple URLs only”. Go through the list and identity URLs that appear due to faceted navigation. 

Okay so now we know how to identify issues with faceted navigation, what’s next?

How Can Problems With Faceted Navigation Be Fixed? 

Now for the good stuff. There’s multiple different ways you can manage faceted navigation – and I’ll show you with examples. 

#1 Optimize Your Robots.txt 

If your facets are causing issues with crawl budget then you’ll want to use robots.txt to block Google from crawling pages. 

Here’s an example from the robots.txt of Adidas. 

You can see that they’re disallowing crawlers from crawling their attributes such as size, age, pant length, best for, and more. They’re telling Googlebot to not crawl pages where those filters are applied. 

One thing to note is that just because you’re preventing crawling, doen’t mean you’ll also prevent indexing. 

You’ll need to make sure those facets don’t return many backlinks and followed internal links. 

You need to make sure that you’re not sending signals to Google that those URLs are valuable. 

#2 Use a canonical tag 

Canonical tags signal the the main version of a page to search engines. For example you have page A, B and C that are very similar. On pages B and C you have a canonical tag that points to A, A contains a self-referecning canonical. You’re now signalling to search engines that A is the version you want to serve in the search results. 

Here’s a canonical tag live in action from Wayfair. 

I’ve selected 6 different filters:

https://www.wayfair.com/filters/furniture/sb6/murphy-beds-c1870814-a115~127-a115~128-a122~149-a122~272216-a122~272219-a122~455589.html

However the canonical tag for the above page is: 

https://www.wayfair.com/furniture/sb0/murphy-beds-c1870814.html

Remember that canonical tags are a indicator, not a directive so if Google or another search engine bot thinks you’ve not implemented it corretctly then you run the risk of it being ignored. 

To prevent your canonical tag from being ignored you need to make sure the main page is relevant to the ones you’re sticking the non self-referencing canonical tag on, and you’ll need to make sure you’re not sending conflicting signals to Google. 

#3 Use noindex tag 

This is a fail safe way of preventing indexing of facet pages (but once the page is noindex you’ll also need to disallow the page from being crawled).

Whatever you do, do not disallow the page from being crawled, and then use the noindex tax. Google may not be able to find the noindex tag because you’ve disallowed the page from being crawled.

The noindex tag will prevent the pages with the tag from being served to users on Google and other search engines. 

Here’s an example of a facet that is noindexed by Adidas. 

https://www.adidas.ca/en/gender_neutral-white-men-sweatshirts_hoodies-clothing?price=price%3C100.0&product_fit=oversized

#4 Combine Strategies

One of my favourite strategies is used by Wayfair. 

• Wayfair allows their category pages to be crawled –  take this URL https://www.wayfair.com/outdoor/sb0/patio-conversation-sets-c35236.html 
• When you choose a facet, I’m choosing 2 person under number of seats I get this URL https://www.wayfair.com/outdoor/sb1/2-person-patio-conversation-sets-c35236-a42296~135927.html. The facet is managed by sb1 – the canonical tag of this page points to the original category. 
• Now when I add a price facet, the URL changed to include /filters/ https://www.wayfair.com/filters/outdoor/sb3/patio-conversation-sets-c35236-a42296~135927-a42296~135928-p923~500~1000.html 

This inclusion of /filters/ in the URL stops Google from crawling this facet, thereby saving Wayfair crawl budget.  

So as you can see it’s also possible to combine strategies to manage faceted navigation. 

Final Word: Faceted Navigation Can Help You Make Money And Help You Lose Money

Faceted navigation is a wonderful feature of the internet. Millions of people around the world use it every day to buy products, find jobs and save time – it’s not going away. 

I recommend that business leaders to continue to use faceted navigation – but use it by following SEO best practices. When used properly you’ll help your customers and yourself. 

You’ll rank for long-tail keywords, more customers will find you and you’ll give customers a great user experience. When managed as part of a broader SEO strategy the possibilities are endless!