Faceted Nav: (Almost) Everyone Is Doing it Wrong

Frank Vitovitch | @FrankieVSEO | #TechSEOBoost
#TechSEOBoost | @CatalystSEM
THANK YOU TO THIS YEAR’S SPONSORS
Faceted Nav: (Almost) Everyone Is Doing it
Wrong
Frank Vitovitch, Botify

FRANK VITOVITCH / BOTIFY
Faceted Navigation:
(Almost) Everyone is
Doing it Wrong

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● Why Faceted Navigations Cause Problems
● Considerations
● Common Facet Handling Methods & Potential Pitfalls
● Where to Start?
Agenda

What Google Tells Us
About Faceted Navigation
“Faceted navigation, such as filtering by color
or price range, can be helpful for your
visitors, but it’s often not search-friendly since
it creates many combinations of URLs with
duplicative content. With duplicative URLs,
search engines may not crawl new or
updated unique content as quickly, and/or
they may not index a page accurately
because indexing signals are diluted
between the duplicate versions.”
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/faceted-
navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html

Google doesn’t crawl half of the average website
Google only crawls 51% of
the average website in a
given 30 day period.
*SMX Paris: How Does Google Crawl the Web
June 13, 2018
Study based on the analysis of 413 million pages crawled
by Botify and 6 billion Googlebot requests.

And even less of larger websites
For websites with
more than 1,000,000
URLs, this crawl ratio
drops down to 34%
CRAWL RATIO AND ACTIVE PAGES RATIO BY WEBSITE SITE

But what about the
long tail?
You were so busy worrying about
whether or not you could create
pages for all of the long-tail, you
never stopped to think if you
should

Faceted Navigation Gone
Wild
ACCESSIBLE
URLS
CRAWLED
URLS
500,000,000+
Number of Accessible URLs after crawling 10M
10,000,000
Number of URLs we crawled following same
rules as Google
< 200,000
Number of products for sales on website

eCommerce Sites
Are not Alone
This content focused website
just underwent a migration
that introduced a faceted
search functionality to it’s
archives.
Only 1,000 of these 490,000+
URLs are actual articles.

SEO Implications of Faceted Navigation
● Duplicate Content
● Crawl Budget Issues
● Internal PageRank Dilution
● Potential Lost External
Link Equity
WORD COUNT (EXCLUDING TEMPLATE) BY FACET COUNT

Almost everyone gets faceted navigation wrong for
2 reasons.
There is no one size fits all, perfect solution and tackling faceted
navigation is often an ongoing process - not something you can
set and forget.
1
Most out of box platforms are not set up to be SEO friendly when
it comes to faceted navigation.
2

2. Considerations for
Handling Faceted
Navigation Pages

How many facets are you letting Google crawl?
In this example, this website crawled
20,000,000 URLs of which, nearly
19,000,000 were to faceted pages.
Just knowing how many facets you have
that are crawlable is only the first
consideration.

Are those faceted pages even driving traffic?
Analyze all of your faceted
pages and determine if these
pages are even driving traffic for
your today.
● Is it specific facets?
● Is it a specific facet count?

And how much crawl budget is being wasted on facets?
0
1
2
3
CRAWLS BY GOOGLE (Bots) VISITS FROM GOOGLE (Users)
Potentially wasted crawl budget

How should you handle facets on your website? Ask
Yourself 2 Questions
Is there demand for the pages I am
currently producing?
1 2
Do you have enough inventory
(products/content) to create a page
with potential to rank?

Do I have
inventory to
support this
page?
Is there sufficient search
demand for this page to
exist?
Should you make those pages crawlable/indexable?
INDEX
PAGE
DON’T
INDEX
YES
NO
YES
NO
BLOCK
CRAWL

Keyword research is essential
This is not a presentation on keyword research but two
great sources of data are:
● GSC Data - what terms are users actually using to get
to your faceted pages?
● Paid Search Data - what terms are actually resulting
in conversions/revenue from faceted pages?

Map Out Search Demand
by Major Categories
RUNNING
SHOES
GENDER
COLOR
SIZE TYPE
WEIGHT BRAND
WIDTH FEATURES
List out all facets that are currently crawlable
by search engines for your major product
categories and map them out based on facets
that have:
● Significant Demand
● Limited Demand
● No Demand

How many products is enough?
Number of Products in the Category Page
Pct(%)ofActiveURLs

3. Common Facet
Handling Methods
& Potential Pitfalls

What tools do we have in our arsenal?

Faceted Nav Tactics Cheat Sheet
Duplicate Content Crawl Budget
Internal PageRank
Dilution
Pass External Link
Equity
Noindex
Nofollow Links
Robots.txt
Canonicals
Parameter Handling
JavaScript

Noindex, no problem? Not quite
Potential Pitfall: Relying solely on noindexing faceted pages.
Consideration: While noindexing the pages should help with duplicate content issues, it will not
help with crawl budget issues and internal pagerank will continue to be passed to nonindexable
pages.
Best Uses: Low inventory pages that may one day have enough inventory to warrant their own
pages and on pages with multiple facets within same grouping are selected.

Long-term no-indexing considerations
Google tries to “remember” things about URLs, so if a
URL has been noindexed in the past, they might be
hesitant to go back and crawl it again, even if the
noindex was removed.
- Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit
Tip: Regularly create a sitemap of URLs whose
noindex/index status has changed.

Nofollowing Facets Helps But...
Potential Pitfall: Relying on nofollowing links to facets that don’t have search
demand to solve duplicate content.
Consideration: These pages can still ultimately get indexed if there isn’t a
noindex tag on them or they are not blocked by robots. This also relies on Google
to respect all the nofollow links in place.
Best Uses: In if used in combination with other tactics to limit discoverability.

Robots.txt Considerations
Potential Pitfalls: Blocking unintended areas of your website and potential lost link equity.
Consideration: Test robots.txt changes by crawling your website with your new directives
to ensure that you have not accidentally blocked any unintended areas of your website.
Best Uses: Blocking facets you are sure have no search demand that will waste crawl
budget and create duplicate content

Don’t forget to noindex
before blocking with robots
Potential Pitfall: It might be tempting to just start
blocking the crawling of facets after they’ve been
index. The problem here is, those pages can stay
in the index.
Consideration: What is worse for your website?
Tip: Create a sitemap of recently noindexed
pages to speed up their removal from the index
(just don’t forget to remove the sitemap
eventually)

JavaScript
Potential Pitfall: When URLs do not change at all, it
can make it difficult for users to share links or to
navigate your product archives.
Considerations: This can be one of the most difficult
and development intensive to implement. UX should
always be considered first.
Adding parameters to the URLs via JavaScript can
make them shareable and provide better UX.

Be careful not to overuse Canonicals
Potential Pitfall: Canonical tags
are meant to be used to mitigate
duplicate content for exact
duplicates, not as a means to
combine signals for near
duplicate content.
Best Uses: For cases of facet
ordering creating unique URLs.

What Google Tells Us About Faceted Navigation
“The cleaner you can
make your signals, the
more likely we'll use
them.”
John Mueller
Reddit AMA
April 2018

4. Where to Start

Bring your brooms,
because it’s a mess
Cleaning up from a faceted
navigation gone wild can be a long,
continuous process full of successes,
failures, and tweaks on tweaks.

The First Cut is the Deepest… Where to Start?
Slow & Steady Approach - When your facets aren’t out of control, starting
slow and gradually limiting crawling/indexing of specific facets.
Tear It Down & Build it Back Up - When you have an massive faceted
navigation problem and you massively reduce crawling/indexing of facets
before gradually re
1
2
We generally see our clients take one of two approaches to tackle issues caused by
faceted navigation

“It Depends”

SCALE & ITERATE
Scale tests that delivered
results & keep testing!
MEASURE
Listen to your data again and
determine if it worked.
Spoiler: it doesn’t always work.
IMPLEMENT
Implement tests to specific
facets/combinations.
ANALYZE
Dive into your data and make
informed decisions based on
your audience’s demand and
your inventory.

Metrics to measure… outside of the obvious
● Active Pages - Did the number of the pages sending traffic drop drastically?
● Pages Crawled - Is Google still crawling URLs you don’t want it to?
● URLs Indexed - How has the number of pages you have indexed changed?
● Crawl Frequency/Rates - Is Google spending less time on faceted pages
and more time elsewhere?
● Click Depth - Is it easier or harder to find important pages (products/content)
● Long Tail Keyword Traffic - Has traffic for longtail terms specifically
dropped?
● Orphaned URLs - Did you cut out any pages that were generating traffic?

When tackling faceted
navigation goes right
Situation: eCommerce website with extensive
product line migrated to a new platform with an
out of box implementation of facet handling.
● All facets were crawlable
● No parameter handling was set up in GSC
● 99% of URLs crawled were faceted URLs
BEFORE
13,000,000+
Number of Accessible URLs
300,000
Number of URLs we crawled following same
rules as Google

95% Increase in Organic Traffic Year Over Year
Implemented a combination of tactics
to tackle the issue.
● Parameter handling in GSC
● Noindex thin product archives
(not enough inventory)
● Nofollow on facets they didn’t want
crawled
(not enough search demand)
● Robots.txt directives to limit crawl
AFTER

Facet Cleanup Leads to
Increase in Crawl Ratio
Situation: Smaller eCommerce website cut
down the size of their site by restricting crawling
on facets.
● Added combination of noindex & canonicals
to handle duplicate content
● Added robots directives to restrict crawling
CRAWL RATIO
(Pct of Linked Pages Crawled by Google
over 30 days)
+20%

More Work Remains Though
While more of the pages they want
crawled are being crawled by Google,
this site now has over 500,000 orphaned
URLs that were still crawled this month.
● Ensure none of the orphans were
receiving traffic
● Reintroduce anything of value that
was lost.

5. Main Takeaways

Leveraging Our Client’s Lessons Learned for Facets
There is no “right” way to handle facets
universally
Consider platform/CMS limitations &
partner with your developers!
Map out all possible facet combinations
before making any changes
Understand your audience and your
inventory before making decisions
Implement changes based on which
problems facets are causing
Use a combination of tactics to handle
facets based on
Monitor your logs daily after making
changes to your facet handling
Continue to tweak facet handling as your
audience & inventory changes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Thank You
Stop by our booth or talk to us at Happy Hour!

Thanks for Viewing the Slideshare!
–
Watch the Recording: https://youtube.com/session-example
Or
Contact us today to discover how Catalyst can deliver unparalleled SEO
results for your business. https://www.catalystdigital.com/

Faceted Nav: (Almost) Everyone Is Doing it Wrong

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Faceted Nav: (Almost) Everyone Is Doing it Wrong