Google’s new help document on faceted navigation

Google has published official help documentation on faceted navigation, which you often see on e-commerce sites, article sites, event sites and more. Google said, if not done right, it can lead to your site generating infinite URL spaces, which can harm your site by causing overcrawling and slower discovery crawls.

What Google said. Gary Illyes from Google said in a blog post, We just published a new document about faceted navigation best practices, which was originally published as a blog post. Yes, we covered that blog post back in 2014.

“Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite number of URLs, leading to,” Gary Illyes added.

• Overcrawling: Search engines waste time crawling countless URLs that aren’t valuable to search users.
• Slower discovery: This overcrawling slows down the discovery of your important, new content.

What Google recommends. Google says if you don’t need the faceted navigation to be indexed, then prevent it from being crawled. If you do need it to be indexed, then follow the best practices to maintain the most efficient URL spaces as possible.

Gary wrote:

• If you don’t need the faceted navigation URLs potentially indexed, prevent crawling of these URLs.
• If you need the faceted navigation URLs potentially indexed, ensure that the URLs follow our best practices outlined in the following section. Keep in mind that crawling faceted URLs tends to cost sites large amounts of computing resources due to the sheer amount of URLs and operations needed to render those pages.

More details. Google posted more details on methods to prevent crawling of faceted navigation URLs and how to ensure the faceted navigation URLs are optimal for the web. You can learn more in this help document.

Why we care. If you help maintain a website that sells products, posts articles, manages events or any site that generated faceted navigation, you probably want to read this help document.

Of course, many of you have years of experience with managing these issues and have come up with solutions that work best for your site.