Faceted navigation
Faceted navigation is filter systems (color, size, price) in shops and directories using URL parameters — often an SEO problem due to duplicate content.
Faceted navigation generates near-infinite URL combinations (/shoes?color=red&size=42&brand=nike&sort=price). Without control Google crawls millions of parameter URLs at the expense of important pages. Strategies: canonicals to base URL, parameter handling in Search Console, robots.txt disallow, or server-side noindex for non-valuable filter URLs.
Example
A shoe shop had 180,000 crawlable URLs of which 175,000 were filter combinations. After implementing canonicals to the base category, indexed URLs dropped to 4,200 and organic traffic doubled.
Frequently asked questions
Which filter URLs do I want indexed?
Filters with search volume: '/shoes/red/' or '/shoes/size-42/' — those can become landing pages. Filters without search volume (sort, view-type) keep out of the index.
Related terms
Further reading
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