Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices

[viatrading1]

Hi,

We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/

We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product.

All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/

Is this the best practice?

Thanks,

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi there,

Generally, faceted URLs are not a best practice for SEO. I suggest you review Google's best and worst practice guidelines for faceted navigation, you can find that here. According to Google, this is often not search-friendly "since it creates many combinations of URLs with duplicative content. With duplicative URLs, search engines may not crawl new or updated unique content as quickly, and/or they may not index a page accurately because indexing signals are diluted between the duplicate versions."

However, If your canonical tags are in place to handle the different parameter/filter URLs that are being created (which will resolve duplicate content issues) you should be fine. Hope this helps!

[viatrading1]

Hi Joe,

On our case, in which we want to have filters and be able to access a filtered URL, is there a better option than faceted navigation?

In this case - since we want to show the same product in different formats (e.g. masonry or list), should we have a different URL for each view?

Thanks,

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi there,

If you want to provide these different sorting/filtering options, faceted navigation is going to be your best option. As I mentioned above, with this approach you need to utilize nofollow, noindex, robots.txt and canonical tags to communicate to search engines where duplicate content will occur.

In the example you provided (masonry or list), you would want a single URL for both views otherwise you are presenting new opportunities for duplicate content.

Happy to discuss further if you have any additional questions!