Google On Faceted Navigation: Block A Lot Of It

Feb 13, 2014 - 8:29 am 5 by

Google's Developer Programs Tech Lead, Maile Ohye and Crawl Team, Mehmet Aktuna wrote a detailed blog post on best practices for faceted navigation. Most faceted navigation are on large sites with filters, such as e-commerce sites with a lot of filter options, or large content sites with many filters and so forth.

Here is a picture Google used to describe it:

Google Faceted Navigation

I am a bit surprised how much Google wants you to block a lot of the navigation, as opposed to using rel=canonical. But maybe I am reading into it too much.

Google explains:

Faceted navigation, such as filtering by color or price range, can be helpful for your visitors, but it’s 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.

So if you have a huge site with faceted navigation, you should 100% read this blog post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

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