All the ins and outs of faceted navigation
Faceted navigation is a component that you will find in almost every large webshop with a wide range. As a webshop owner, you want your visitors to be able to easily find the desired product. Faceted navigation offers the solution for this! With faceted navigation, it is important that it is set up correctly, so as not to endanger the SEO of your website. In this blog, we will explain everything about faceted navigation, so that you know what the dangers and solutions are. Read on quickly!
What is faceted navigation?
First of all, we would like to explain what faceted navigation means exactly. By means of faceted navigation, you guide users through your offer. You implement search filters, which improve the user-friendliness of the search process. In email data the image below from Bol.com, you see various filters. When visitors check the option “8K”, six more products are filtered and therefore shown.
As we have explained faceted navigation has a positive effect
on the user-friendlinss of your webshop. However, it does pose risks for the SEO of the website if faceted navigation is set up nan ka sa a enstale a incorrectly. In most webshops, the filters link to a URL with PHP parameters. This can ultimately result in hundreds to thousands of URL combinations from one URL. This is not a problem for users, because it does not affect the user experience. However, this does have an effect on search engines, aob directory because the crawler sees these as unique URLs. Because the search engine sees these as unique URLs, some problems can arise for your shop.
Duplicate content
The first issue we want to discuss is duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when there are multiple pages with identical or largely identical content. The problem with this is that Google can rank the wrong page in the search results. To prevent this issue, it is advisable to use a canonical. You can read more about this later in this blog.
Crawl budget waste
Another issue that can arise when faceted navigation is used incorrectly is crawl budget waste. Google then crawls pages with little valuable content, which wastes crawl budget. As a webshop owner, you would rather have spent this on valuable pages that you want to rank with in Google. This issue also ensures that it can take a long time before the page is recrawled. This is also unfavorable and you want to avoid it.
