When it comes to huge sites, like eCommerce sites that have thousands and hundreds of webpages, the significance of factors like the crawl budget cannot be overstated.
The creation of a website with an structured structure and an effective inner linking strategies is crucial for these kinds of websites.
However, doing this correctly is often a challenge when trying to incorporate various characteristics that are a common aspect of ecommerce (sizes color, sizes and price ranges, for instance. ).
Faceted navigation could help in overcoming these problems on websites with large amounts of content.
The faceted navigator should be thought-through and executed correctly to ensure both the users and the search engine robots are happy.
Describe Faceted Navigation.
Let’s get started by diving into what faceted navigation really is.
Faceted navigation is in many cases, on the sidebars or menus of an online shop and is comprised of numerous categories, files and aspects.
It basically lets users modify their search according to what they’re looking for on the website.
For example, a person may require a purple cardigan that is a size medium with black trim.
Facets are indexable categories that aid in narrowing the production listings and serve as a complement to a website’s primary categories.
Facets, in their most optimal form, should have a unique value for each choice and, when they are indexed, every one of them on a website should provide relevancy signalling to the search engine, by ensuring that all crucial features are included in the text within the pages.
Filters are used to sort things using the help of a listing page.
While users can make use of this feature to narrow down the content they want to find however the content of the page is the same.
This could lead to multiple URLs that create duplicate content which could be a problem for SEO.
There are some potential problems that faceted navigation could cause which could negatively impact SEO. The three main issues are:
- Duplicate content.
- A wasteful crawl budget.
- Diluted link equity.
The number of closely related content pieces is growing rapidly and the same link could be going to all the different versions of a website that could reduce the value of a link and influence the pages’ ranking as well as create an endless crawl space.
It is essential to take specific steps to ensure that crawlers from search engines don’t spend their crawl budgets on sites which have nothing to offer.
The process of canonization
Converting facet search pages to SEO-friendly canonical URLs to collect landing pages is an eminent SEO method.
For instance, if you are looking to market the phrase “gray t-shirts,” which is broad in its meaning however, it is not optimal to concentrate on one specific T-shirt. Instead the term should be utilized in a page which lists all gray T-shirts. This is done by converting the facets into URLs that are user-friendly and then canonicalizing the URLs.
For instance, Zalando’s FX are a great example of how it makes use of facets to create collections pages.
If you add an additional filter on the gray t-shirt let’s take the name of the company is Adidas and you’ll get an SEO-friendly URL that has meta tags that are canonical and the correct Hreflangs that can be used for different local languages within the code source
If you choose to add a copy to the pages, ensure that you modify your H1 tags and the copy to match to prevent the possibility of keyword cannibalization.
Not indexing
Noindex tags can be used to notify bots of pages are not included within the index.
For instance, if you wanted to include a page of “gray t-shirt” in the index, but you did not require pages with a price filters included on them, adding a noindex tag on the second result would not include it.
It is important to note that even though this method is used to remove websites from indexing, they will the crawl budget allocated to them, if search engine robots locate those links and begin crawling these pages. To optimizing the crawl budget the use of robots.txt is the most effective method.
Txt Robots
The disabling of facet search sites via robots.txt is the most effective way to control the crawl budget. To deny pages that have pricing parameters like e.g. “/?price=50_100”, apply the following robots.txt rule.
This directive warns the search engines not to crawl any URL that contains the parameter ‘price= which is increasing the budget for crawls by not crawling the pages with these parameters.
If however, external links linking to any URL that had this parameter in the URL, Google could still be able to index it. When the content of these backlinks is excellent you might consider using the an approach known as canonical to consolidate your links to a specific URL.
In other words, you don’t have to be concerned because Google has confirmed that they would drop in time.
Other Strategies for Making the Most of Faceted Navigation
- Implement pagination by using rel=”next” or rel=”prev” to link indexing properties of pages to a series an entire.
- Every page should connect to the children’s pages and the parent page. This can be accomplished with breadcrumbs.
- Use only canonical URLs on sitemaps when you decide to canonicalize your facets ‘ search pages.
- Use unique H1 tags and information in the case of facest URLs that are canonicalized.
- Facets should present in a uniform order, which is logical (i.e. the alphabetical sequence).
- Implement AJAX to filter your search results, allowing users to see the results without having to reload the page. Always change the URL after filtering, so that users can save their search pages to return in the future. Do not implement AJAX without altering the URL.
- Make sure that faceted navigation is optimized for any device, mobile or otherwise via the use of responsive design.
In conclusion
While faceted navigation may be beneficial for UX but it could also create many issues for SEO.
Duplicate content and wasted crawl budget, and degraded link equity could create serious problems for websites. However, you can address these issues by implementing some of the techniques mentioned within this post.
It is essential to meticulously design and implement facet navigation so as to avoid a lot of problems in the future with regard to facet navigation.