Google updated an old document and released it as the official guidelines for managing faceted navigation. The company also warned website owners and SEO professionals to evaluate their faceted navigation and comply with the new guidelines to optimize their site’s crawling and indexing.
Faceted navigation recap
Setting filters, such as size, color, and price, when searching for a product is an example of faceted navigation, also known as guided navigation or faceted search.
Faceted navigation helps e-commerce website visitors quickly navigate and personalize their search, ensuring the end result is the product they`re looking for.
However, while the feature is vital for prospects and sellers, it can also cause crawling and indexing problems for search engines.
Google released its new guidelines to help site owners avoid those challenges.
SEO and the faceted navigation nightmare
Google knows that faceted navigation causes search problems. Each facet (for example, “red T-shirt, size medium, under $20”) creates multiple versions of the original URL.
Google Analyst Gary Illyes mentions this, saying faceted navigation can be an SEO nightmare.
- “Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite number of URLs.”
Gary explained what problems that can cause:
- Search engines waste time and crawl budget by over-crawling multiple URLs that don’t provide value to users.
- Over-crawling affects the speed at which search engines can discover relevant content users seek.
Google says faceted navigation is the number one cause of crawling issues and is often avoidable.
Google updates guidelines
Google announced the guidelines on Search Central in its `Crawling December` series. Most of the information is in the original post, with some important updates.
Here’s Google’s announcement on LinkedIn:
Google recommends
Gary Illyes said in his `Crawling December’ post that site owners should prevent faceted navigation from being crawled to avoid search engines from indexing it if they don’t need it.
They should also follow Google’s guidelines and best practices to sustain efficient URL spaces and avoid overloading their site’s crawl budget.
Gary wrote:
- “If you don’t need the faceted navigation URLs potentially indexed, prevent crawling these URLs.”
- “If you need the faceted navigation URLs potentially indexed, ensure that the URLs follow our best practices outlined in the following section. Keep in mind that crawling faceted URLs tend to cost sites large amounts of computing resources due to the sheer amount of URLs and operations needed to render those pages.”
Google wrote on LinkedIn:
- “Regardless of what kind of site you have — events, blog, or a shop, there’s a reasonable chance that your site is exposing URLs that are just a variation of something already discovered under a different URL. These duplicate URLs waste your crawl budget and your server resources; in fact, the most common source of complaints we get about crawling can be traced back to these useless URL spaces, more often than not caused by faceted navigation.”
The takeaway
Now, Google has made its faceted navigation blog an official documentation guideline; it suggests that the tech giant is anticipating and preparing for increasingly complex website structures.
Site owners should follow Google’s new guidelines to avoid over-crawling issues, such as the slow discovery of new content and the waste of crawl resources, by optimizing filter URLs or blocking them entirely. Google explains how to do both on its new faceted navigation best practices page.
