If you have a large website, it is crucial that you optimise its architecture and your internal linking strategy. This will determine whether your visitors can get to certain pages with a few clicks or if they need to jump through endless hoops first. It will also increase your website’s crawl efficiency.

However, this task is easier said than done, especially if you have hundreds or even thousands of pages. Crawlers could easily get lost on pages with irrelevant or even duplicate content. This is where faceted navigation comes in.

Faceted Navigation Defined

Faceted navigation is a system that consists of facets and filters and is typically found in the sidebar of an e-commerce site. It allows users to choose a combination of attributes when filtering a long list of products, narrowing it down until it matches their needs.

Faceted navigation makes life easier for online shoppers. However, it presents a unique challenge for SEO. If not properly implemented, it could cause search engines to miss the most important pages on your website. But do it right, and you will enjoy a host of benefits, from enhanced user experience to increase sales.

SEO Problems to Watch Out for When Using Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation can be a nightmare for SEO. Below are some of the problems to look out for if you use them.

• Duplicate Content

E-commerce websites have hundreds or even thousands of pages containing various products, and many of these pages look similar to each other. This could be a problem, especially if you leave all these pages open to crawling and indexing. Additionally, facets would not change the page content much or not at all. It could lead to duplicate content, which will end up wasting a large portion of your crawl budget.

• Reduced Link Equity

Having near-duplicate content could reduce the value of the links in your website as these links could go to any of the duplicate pages. To be more specific, your internal linking will be diluted across multiple URLs as there are hundreds of variations of a page.  

To avoid this problem, you must set some limitations on what pages can be crawled and indexed. You can do this by identifying which facets would not add value to your SEO and blacklisting them from search crawlers.

• Wasted Crawl Bandwidth

With more pages that are virtually identical, search engines will have to spend more time crawling them. In this case, the bots could end up skipping some of your pages. Additionally, they could run out of time to crawl your pages properly. If these pages happen to have valuable content, you could miss out on potential leads and even sales.

• Create Crawl Traps

In some cases, faceted navigation can create an infinite number of combinations of your main URL. Bots could end up crawling them endlessly, essentially getting trapped in an endless loop.

While faceted navigation can be problematic, it is not all doom and gloom. There are ways to implement the system such that you will delight your target customers and appease the search engines as well.

One of the main things you have to do is verify whether the search intent for a certain topic exists. From there, you can categorise your pages as “block crawl,” “index,” or “do not index.” You can use your best judgment at first to decide which is which. Over time, you can run tests to determine which pages to add.