Faceted Navigation: Filters and Indexing
Faceted Navigation — filters in the catalog: color, size, price, brand. For the buyer, this is convenience; for search engines, it is a source of almost infinite addresses because filters combine with each other.
What is the Danger
Twenty filters create millions of combinations. The robot spends time crawling them, thousands of nearly identical pages get indexed, and important cards are crawled less frequently. This is a classic reason why a large catalog is partially indexed.
Three Categories of Filters
| Category | Examples | What to Do |
|---|---|---|
| There is demand, the page is useful | “winter tires 17 inches” | Open, provide a unique title and text, link from the menu |
| No demand, but the page is meaningful | Combination of two rare filters | Keep accessible but do not index |
| Technical parameters | Sorting, list view, sessions | Close from indexing and do not provide links |
How to Organize
- Export the list of addresses with parameters from logs or the indexing report.
- Check against frequency: what people are actually searching for — see keyword selection.
- For in-demand combinations, create static addresses and unique titles.
- Close the rest with a noindex meta tag and remove from internal linking.
- Check in a month if the crawl coverage of the necessary pages has increased.
Connection to Promotion
Links to filters make sense only if it is an open, meaningful, and stable page for specific demand. In all other cases, the acceptor should be a section of the catalog or a card — see donor and acceptor.
Where Duplicates Come From
Even filters closed from indexing create a problem if there are regular links to them from catalog pages: the robot still crawls them and spends crawl budget. Therefore, the solution consists of two parts — prohibit indexing and simultaneously remove links from the layout, allowing filters to function without direct links.
A separate source of duplicates is the order of parameters in the address. The same set of filters selected in a different sequence can yield different addresses with identical content. The order of parameters should be normalized on the server side.
Sorting is Not a Filter
Sorting by price or novelty does not change the set of products, only their order. Such addresses should never be indexed: they are guaranteed duplicates of the section.