Facets Being Indexed - What's the Impact?

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Our facets are from what I can see crawled by search engines, I think they use javascript - see here http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers

I want to get this fixed for SEO with an ajax solution - I'm not sure how big this job is for developers, but they will want to know the positive impact this could have & whether it's worth doing.

Does anyone have any opinions on this?

I haven't encountered this before so any help is welcome

[dohertyjf]

Hey Becky, I see you posting a bunch about your technical SEO and internal linking/indexation discoveries. Great to see that you're digging in deep!

When you say a "facet", do you mean a link like this - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/multipurpose-storage-lockers#facet:-70000000000000105744949554832109109&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:5&pageView:grid& ?

If that's the case, that page has a canonical on it back to the base of http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/multipurpose-storage-lockers, but you should take a look in your server logs (this is a good place to start - https://builtvisible.com/log-file-analysis/) to see if these are being hit by Googlebot.

Just trying to figure out what you're asking so I can try to help!

[BeckyKey]

Hi John,

Yeh I'm just trying to understand it all Yes that's what I mean with the facet link you've shown.

I just want to ensure I'm not wasting Googlebot's time crawling facets which don't need to be crawled.

I'm not so worried about the duplicate pages as there's a canonical, but I don't think these facets are SEO friendly - I'm trying to work out how to make them SEO friendly

[dohertyjf]

It's a really interesting question and I wonder if they are being crawled. The link destination on them in the right sidebar goes to /#, which shouldn't let the search engines crawl these links.

Are you seeing these parameters in Search Console or your log files? That is where I would look to see if they are actually being hit by Googlebot.

If they are, then you should remove that anchor link and let the checkboxes activate the facets. Not sure how easy this is to do technically, but it's the right way to do it.

[BeckyKey]

Thanks, I'll do that as a starting point

[BeckyKey]

I am confused as to whether they're even being crawled if Google ignores everything after the #

Perhaps they're being crawled but not indexed...

[dohertyjf]

Hey Becky, I definitely question if they're being crawled at all. Do you have access to your server logs at all? If so, you could then use Screaming Frog's Log Analyser (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/log-file-analyser/) to parse through them and find if Googlebot is indeed hitting those pages. It would be worth the investigation!

[BeckyKey]

I think I'd have to request these. I know it's something I need to look at, but I;m not sure how high a priority I should put on it.

Do you think it would make a huge difference if they were stopped from being crawled?