Faceted navigation
Filter URLs that can create crawl and duplicate issues if uncontrolled.
Faceted navigation in plain English
Faceted navigation is the set of filters on a listing page that let shoppers narrow results by attributes such as size, colour, brand or price. Each combination of filters often creates its own URL. Google's guide to managing faceted navigation explains how these URLs can multiply and how to control them.
How to check faceted navigation on your site
In Search Console's page indexing report, look for URLs with parameters such as "?colour=" or "?sort=". Run a crawler and see how many URLs it finds compared with your number of products. If it's many times higher, your filters are generating more URLs than needed.
A worked example
A clothing shop with 300 products discovers Google has found over 100,000 URLs, mostly filter combinations. It decides which few filtered views have genuine search demand and turns them into proper category pages with their own copy, then stops crawlers following the rest of the filter links.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Letting every filter combination be crawled and indexed.
- Blocking all filters, including ones customers search for.
- Relying only on canonical tags to clean up millions of URLs.
- Changing filter URL structures without redirects.
Why a small site should care
Filters are great for shoppers but can create huge numbers of near-duplicate URLs, which waste crawling and confuse search engines. On the other hand, some filtered views match real searches, such as "women's waterproof walking boots", and deserve to be indexable pages in their own right.
The aim isn't to remove filters, which customers rely on. It's to decide which filtered pages deserve to be found in search and keep the rest out of the way, so crawlers spend their time on pages that matter.
Connected technical terms
- Ecommerce SEO: SEO for product and category architectures and product content.
- Crawl budget: Roughly how much attention Googlebot gives to crawling a site.
- Canonical URL: The preferred URL for duplicate or similar content, declared with rel=canonical.
- Duplicate content: Same or near-identical content on multiple URLs.
Start with a free SEO audit
Your whole site, audited free. No card and no obligation.