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
Selecting filters with faceted navigation can cause many URL combinations, such as
http://www.example.com/category.php?category=gummy-candies&price=5-10&price=over-10Background
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 homepage or a category page.
