Faceted Navigation Enhancement

Faceted navigation is the process to help visitors in navigating and personalizing a page to find out the exact product for which they are looking, it creates can also help people search specific long-tail queries and find out the exact product they are looking for in the search result. Faceted navigation is the biggest opportunity for improving natural search performance. 

It is applied sets of filters to list out the product shown on the browse grid pages. Choosing product attributes in these filters allows shoppers to select the narrow product offered to increase the like to purchase. When it comes to large websites such as a site of e-commerce there are thousands upon thousands of pages that are important things like crawl budget it is unable to understand in such cases building a website with an organised architecture and smart internal linking strategy is the key fact to be used for these types of sites. 

Faceted navigation can help to solve these challenges and problems on large websites however faceted navigation must be executed properly so that both users and search engine bots remain happy. Faceted navigation is one of the most cases located on the sidebars of an e-commerce website and having multiple categories files and facets, it helps and allows visitors to customize their search based on what they are looking for on the website for an example the visitor may want black track pant with a white stripe in a medium size.

 Facets are indexed categories that help up down up production listing and also functions as an extension of main categories of a site they are the best form that ideal e provide a unique value for each selection and as they are indexed each one of a site should send relevance signal to search engine by making sure that all the content of the pages appears is within critical attributes. 

The users may use this to narrow down what they are looking for the actual content on the page which remains the same this can potentially lead to URL creating duplicate content which is a concern of SEO three main potential issues can be created by faceted navigation the first one is ‘duplicate content’ second the ‘wasted crawl budget‘ and the last one is ‘diluted link equity’. 

Different parameters are created and are quickly multiplied the number of incredibly continues to grow significantly and different links can be going to all of these different versions of pages which can affect dilute link equity and may affect the page’s ranking ability. 

Certain steps can be started with preventing search engine bots from crawling certain multi-selected facets such as colour or size when we are trying to determine the method to solve this faceted navigation conundrum there is some solution that can be helpful which one to use however we will rely heavily on what parts of the site should be indexed. 

The first is no index tax that can be implemented to inform boats of which pages not to include in the index it will remove pages of the index but there will still be a crawl budget spent on them and link equity that is diluted. For example, if you want to include red trousers in the index but did not want red trousers under 5 dollars in the index then you can use a no-index tag which will result to exclude it. 

A disallowed can be implemented for certain site sections there are few advantages of this solution is that it is fast and customizable link equity may be hindered from the different parts of the site for example we can disallow red trouser under $5 in the robots file instructing that Google to not visit a page with the less than $5 parameter however if anyone follows links pointing to any URL with that parameter in it existed Google will Steel possible to index it. 

Another point is a canonical tag which allows you to instruct the groups of alike pages which Google has preferred person. Canonical tag can also be ignored by the search engines so that its solution can be used with another for example red trouser under 5 can have the canonical URL set as Red trouser Google will attribute the authority and link equity that canonicalized page but will crawl budget still be wasted.

Another affecting factor is AJAX which has the positive benefit that a different new URL is not generated when a visitor visits a page and select any filter a scrolling path must be assessable to the particular pages that are essential to get into ranking to ensure this method. 

There are some other ways to get the most out of faceted navigation -one can link the children’s pages and parents according to their needs, can use rigorous URL facet ordering so that the problem of duplication does not arise, when no items are present for the filters try to prevent clicks, use only e canonical URL in the sitemap, present your facet in a unified logical manner and don’t solely on one fix if it does not take care of indexing link dilution and crawl for example no index and nofollow tags do not help in crawl budget same is with configuring parameters inside Google search console considered allowing indexation if a particular combination of facets occurs that receive a good amount of traffic in a site. 

It is crucial to carefully plan and implement the important methods available to avoid any issues down the line when it comes to facet navigation although it is great for UX then also can cause a multitude of problems for SEO, duplicate content vested crawl budget and diluted link equity can all cause several problems on a site.