You know what faceted navigation is, even if you don’t know the term. Think of every time you’ve browsed an ecommerce site and filtered products by color, size, price, brand, review score, shipping speed, or whether it’s made for dogs.
You can find out if your favorite store sells a yellow wool sweater in under four moves (well, clicks), and that modern miracle is made possible by faceted navigation.
And it’s not just for ecommerce sites. Real estate listings, travel booking platforms, recipe databases, and even B2B directories often lean hard into faceted filtering to help users zero in on exactly what they want.
Granting the power of endless choice doesn’t come without cost, however. If you’re not careful, it can become a real SEO disaster.
Let’s break it down.
More Links, More Problems
Faceted navigation works by dynamically generating URLs for each combination of filters a user selects.
That means a new URL for yellow sweaters. Another for yellow sweaters under $50. Another for yellow sweaters under $50 made from cotton. And so on.
The point here: that’s a lot of links.
This endless branch of links is problematic because search engines crawl websites one page at a time. Each new URL is treated like a new page, even if the content on those pages is largely the same.
As these variations pile up, they can lead to several errors we’ve come across while auditing sites:
When Faceted Navigation Goes Unchecked
- Duplicate Content: Many filtered pages contain overlapping or identical content, which can confuse search engines and dilute ranking signals.
- Wasted Crawl Budget: Search engines allocate a limited amount of crawl activity per site. Crawling thousands of nearly identical pages can prevent the indexing of your most important ones.
- Thin Content Pages: Some filtered combinations may result in pages with very few products or little useful content, which can hurt site quality in the eyes of search engines.
- Internal Link Dilution: When link equity is spread across many similar pages, it can reduce the authority of key category or product pages.
Left unchecked, faceted navigation can make it harder for your most important pages to rank.
SEO Best Practices for Faceted Navigation
Don’t worry, we’re not here to kill your filters. We’re just here to suggest giving them some boundaries. Here’s how to keep your site’s UX well-oiled while also staying tight with the Google.
Control with Robots.txt and Meta Tags
Robots.txt is your site’s bouncer—posted at the root of your domain, this file tells search engines which parts of your site they’re not allowed to enter. It's especially useful for blocking crawler access to faceted URLs that don't offer unique value for search.
You can edit your robots.txt file manually (usually via your CMS or hosting platform) and add simple rules like:
Disallow: /products?color=
Disallow: /products?size=
This helps conserve crawl budget and keeps duplicate pages out of search results. For more granular control, use noindex meta tags on individual pages you don’t want indexed, like specific filter combinations that add no real SEO value.
Use URL Parameters Wisely
It’s okay for your filters to update the URL using parameters (like ?color=red&size=medium), but make sure you’re only allowing certain combinations to be indexed. Use canonical tags to point to the main version of a page, and avoid indexation of pages with low-value filters (like “1-star reviews only”... no one’s shopping for those).
Do Your Filters Need Fixes?
Faceted navigation is a UX powerhouse—but it needs an SEO leash. Want to make sure your filters aren’t tanking your search traffic? We’ve got you covered.
From building ecommerce sites that convert to running deep-dive SEO audits that surface hidden issues, we help businesses create smarter, leaner, more findable websites. Reach out to us to get started.
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