Faceted navigation
Many filters, categories with accompanying URLs (like Amazon’s filtering)
Common Approaches
Index Everything
- Causes problems with crawling because it represents so many URLs they have to crawl
- Most are low value for search engines
- Filters thin out equity of category pages, reducing their rankings
- Can make it difficult to crawl
Index Nothing
- No “long-tail gold”
Better Approaches
Understand Your Taxonomy
- Filters should add granularity to categories
- Don’t replicate categories as filters. No overlap.
Size Up Keyword Opportunities
- Find them
- SEMRush keyword magic tool and Sistrics keyword discovery tool. Search for category and look for long-tail keywords.
- Filter site’s GA for filters to find popular ones
- Check site search queries
- Index URLs that correspond to those keywords.
Tips for URLs
- Use hyphens in filters instead of underscore. Google doesn’t interpret underscore as a space.
- Use params or subfolders
Filter Permutations Tips
- Do not allow more than one option from the same filter group to be applied
- If the URL has filter options not on the allow list, it shouldn’t be indexable
- Typically, max two parametes indexed in a single URL
- Nofollow sort and listings per page options
Canonical vs. nofollow
- Canonical for preserving equity from somewhere else
- Not a hard-and-fast rule. Search engines can ignore canonical. Most of the time, they do.
- nofollow is more of a directive
- Can’t pass equity to somewhere else
- More authoritative than canonical
For Enterprise
- See what params are frequently excluded in Google Search Console by Google. This tells you what Google doesn’t care about.
- Note: Use the API to get access to more data. Use Search Analytics for Google Sheets to get access to API data
- Look at similar.ai to automated what should and shouldn’t be indexed.