What Is Faceted Navigation?

Date First Published: 25th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Development

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what faceted navigation is in this article.

Faceted navigation, also known as faceted search, is a functionality that allows visitors to filter search results based on the faceted classification of the items. For example, on an ecommerce site, faceted navigation might be located in the sidebar and allow visitors to narrow down the search results by applying filters to the colours, sizes, prices, and sellers. Faceted navigation is useful for large sites with a large number of listings as it helps visitors find what they are looking for much more quickly. Below is an example of faceted navigation on eBay.

SEO

Faceted navigation can lead to SEO issues. Examples of issues include duplicate content and a wasted crawl budget. Faceted navigation can lead to duplicate content issues because it creates a new webpage for every possible filter combination. The filter pages create almost identical content to the original page that is accessible under different URLs, just with different listings. This can make it difficult to optimise all the pages for SEO without coming across duplicate content issues. Sometimes, faceted navigation can create thousands of almost identical pages for very specific and precise content that users would not search for and having those types of pages indexed does not fulfil search demand.

Faceted navigation URLs can be prevented from being included in the search results using the noindex tag. This is used for instructing search engines to not index the page. This can solve duplicate content issues. However, search engine bots will still be coming to these pages, which will still be wasting the crawl budget of a site.

Faceted navigation can waste the crawl budget of a site as search engine bots will waste it on pages that should not come up in the search results, which will take the main focus off the important pages.

However, if the content is optimised in the correct way, multiple pages can rank for several long-tail keywords by allowing them to come up in search engines for specific terms that have a sufficient search volume, such as 'black running shoes size 12'.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Faceted Navigation

• Since users can find what they are looking for more quickly, it will improve the user experience.
• It enables customisation. This will allow visitors to personalise a page to find a product that they are exactly looking for.
• It will make products more visible to users. Without faceted navigation, products might get stuck a few pages back in the search results and not receive any views.

• Since it creates a lot of webpages with almost identical content, it can lead to SEO issues, such as duplicate content and a wasted crawl budget.
• It often leads to almost identical pages being indexed in the search results that do not fulfil search demand.
• If there are too many filters, it can irritate users and require them to look through lots of different filters to find the one they are looking for.

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