Impact of Faceted Navigation

Faceted Navigation Intro – Whiteboard Friday

Faceted navigation can complicate a good SEO strategy by causing crawling errors or excessive information given to the search engine when it crawls through your site. Generally, faceted navigation is anytime your site uses a filter for information on your site. Say if you want to only show results to users of your site for products available to be shipped tomorrow that could overlap with products that also ship in 2 days. So the same product could apply to multiple categories within your site and the excessive information as the search engine crawls your site causes serious problems to your SEO strategy. The best way to solve this problem is to keep the search engine from crawling just a portion of your site that utilizes the filtering technology. You can label those sites so that the search engines don't crawl your sites with a number of methods.

Key Takeaways:

Faceted navigation would be an awesome thing for consumers but could cause issues for service providers such as bloated servers etc.

A way to fix the problems potentially caused by faceted navigation would be to stop Google from indexing a page if it is too bloated.

Important websites that can benefit from indexed/crowded pages should be whitelisted so they can work at full functionality.

“The main, most common options that we have for controlling this kind of thing would be around no indexing a page and stopping Google from indexing it, using canonical tags to choose a page that's essentially the canonical version, using a disallow rule in robots.txt to stop Google from crawling a certain part of the site, or using the nofollow meta directive as well. Those are some of the most common options”

Read more: https://moz.com/blog/faceted-navigation-intro

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