Faceted Navigation
What is Faceted Navigation?
Faceted navigation is a type of website user interface that allows users to quickly sort and narrow down many results to the specific items they are looking for. Faceted navigation is great for user experience and rankings when properly configured. Still, it can pose SEO issues if not executed correctly.
Here’s an example of faceted navigation on an e-commerce website:
Where is faceted navigation used?
Faceted navigation is commonly found on sites with large amounts of data to sort. You’ll almost always see it on:
- Ecommerce websites
- Job portals
- Travel websites
- Stock photography sites
- Image boards such as Pinterest
- Large content sites such as recipe sites
Pros and cons of faceted navigation
Faceted navigation is very convenient for website users, however it can cause some troubles in terms of SEO.
Pros of faceted navigation
The main advantage of faceted navigation is that it provides excellent user experience by letting users quickly sort data and easily find what they’re looking for based on multipole criteria.
Cons of faceted navigation
When incorrectly configured, faceted navigation can create a host of SEO-related issues. Some common issues that you might face are:
- Wasting your crawl budget.
- Possible duplicate content issues.
- Increased risk of keyword cannibalization.
This means that, unlike breadcrumb navigation, for example, faceted navigation requires special attention in terms of crawling and indexing by search engines.