Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
-
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,
-
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!
-
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,
-
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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best practice to 301 NON-WWW pages?
Hi Guys, Have a site which has 302 redirects installed for pages like: https://domain.com.au/ to https://www.domain.com.au/ (302 redirect) Is it worth changing the redirect to a 301? This is a large site, like 10,000 pages. Also does anyone know how can this be done via Magento? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Internal Links - Different URLs
Hey so, In my product page, I have recommended products at the bottom. The issue is that those recommended products have long parameters such as sitename.com/product-xy-z/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs The reason why it has that long parameter is due to tracking purposes (internally with the dev and UX team). My question is, should I replace it with the clean URL or as long as it has the canonical tag, it should be okay to have such a long parameter? I would think clean URL would help with internal links and what not...but if it already has a canonical tag would it help? Another issue is that the URL is different and not just the parameter. For instance..the canonical URL is sitename.com/productname-xyz/ and so the internal link used on the product page (same exact page just different URL with parameter) sitename.com/xyz/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs (missing product name), BUT still has the canonical tag!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Redirecting to Modal URLs
Hi everyone! Long time no chat - hope you're all well! I have a question that for some reason is causing me some trouble. I have a client that is creating a new website, the process was a mess and I am doing a last minute redirect file for them (long story, for another time). They have different teams for different business categories, so there are multiple staff pages with a list of staffers, and a link to their individual pages. Currently they have a structure like this for their staff bios... www.example.com/category-staff/bob-johnson/ But now, to access the staffers bio, a modal pops up. For instance... www.example.com/category-staff/#bob-johnson Should I redirect current staffers URLs to the staff category, or the modal URL? Unfortunately, we are late in the game and this is the way the bio pages are set up. Would love thoughts, thanks so much guys!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickDelehanty0 -
Advanced: SEO best practice for a large forum to minimise risk...?
Hi Hope someone can offer some insight here. We have a site with an active forum. The transactional side of the site is about 300 pages totals, and the forum is well over 100,000 (and growing daily) meaning the 'important' pages account for less that 0.5% of all pages on the site. Rankings are pretty good and we're ticking lots of boxes with the main site, with good natural links, logical architecture, appropriate keyword targeting. I'm worried about the following: crawl budget PR flow Panda We actively moderate the forum for spam and generally the content is good (for a forum anyway), so I'm just looking for any best practice tips for minimising risk. I've contemplated moving the forum to a subdomain so there's that separation, or even noindexing the forum completely, although it does pull in traffic. Has anyone been in a similar situation? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iProspect_Manchester1 -
URL Structure
URL i have to use targeted keyword on all sub page domain or not for example now i am using url like this format fundingtype.html litigation-funding.html legal-funding.html financingservices.html process.html and if i re-write all url with targated keyword like this format lawsuit-loans-fundingtype.html lawsuit-loans-litigation-funding.html lawsuit-loans-legal-funding.html lawsuit-loans-financingservices.html lawsuit-loans-process.html so which type URL are more effective for best SEO ??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JulieWhite0 -
What Should I Do With My URL Names?
I release property on my blog each week, and it has come to the point we will get property in the same area as we have had in the past. So, I name my URL /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]/ for the first property in that area right. Now I get a different property in that same area and the URL will have to be named /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]-2/. Now I'm not sure if this is a major issue or not, but I'm sure there must be a better way than this, and I don't really want to take down our past properties - unless you can give me good reason too, of course? So before I start getting URLs like this: /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]-2334343534654/ (well, ok, maybe not that bad! But you get my point) I wanted to see what everyones opinion on it is 🙂 Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathanRolande0 -
New URL : Which is best
Which is best: www.domainname.com/category-subcategory or www.domainname.com/subcategory-category or www.domainname.com/category/subcategory or www.domain.com/subcategory/category I am going to have 12 different subcategories under the category
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Google Places, Multiple locations best practice
What is the best practice with having multiple locations in Google Places. Does having multiple Google Places set up for each business have a big effect on local rankings for the individual areas? Should I use the home page for the website listed on each page or is it better to have a specific landing page for each Google Places listing? Any other tips? Thanks, Daniel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0