What is faceted navigation?
Faceted navigation is the set of filters on a collection page that let shoppers narrow results by attributes such as size, colour, price or material.
Worked example, not a result
How filters multiply into thousands of URLs
Say a collection offers filters for five colours, seven sizes and four materials. Combined in every order, that is 140 possible filtered views of one collection. Multiply by 96 collections and the site can generate 13,440 filtered URLs, most of which nobody will ever search for.
If each of those is a crawlable, indexable page, the site has buried its real collection pages under thousands of near duplicates. Crawl effort goes to combinations of no commercial value, and the pages that should rank compete against their own variations.
The answer is not to remove the filters. Shoppers use them and they raise conversion. The answer is to decide which filtered views are real pages worth ranking, usually a small number that match how people actually search, and to make the rest usable for shoppers without being treated as separate pages.
The counts here are an example of the arithmetic, not of any particular store.
Why it matters
Filtering is one of the strongest conversion features a catalogue site has. A shopper who narrows to their size and colour is telling you exactly what they want, and giving them a short relevant list instead of a long one is the difference between browsing and buying.
The same feature works against the visitors lever if it is left unmanaged. Search engines spend a limited amount of effort on any site, and a store that generates thousands of thin filtered URLs spends that effort on pages with no purpose, while genuinely valuable collection pages get crawled less often and rank worse.
For a store owner the decision is which filtered views deserve to be pages. If people search for a specific combination often enough, that view is worth treating as a real page with its own title and copy. Everything else should work perfectly for shoppers and stay out of the index.
Common mistakes
- Letting every filter combination be indexable. The result is thousands of near identical pages competing with the collection they came from.
- Blocking filters entirely from crawling. That also removes the handful of filtered views that genuinely match how people search and could rank on their own.
- Ignoring sort order and pagination parameters. They create additional versions of the same page and cause exactly the same problem as filters.
- Building filters that produce empty results. A shopper who narrows to a combination with nothing in it usually leaves rather than starting again.
Related terms and answers
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