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Faceted navigation means a method by which economical brands analyze, organize, and filter large sets of products based on inventory for users to filter size, color, and brand as per the user's requirement.
When it comes to faceted navigation or establishing a website, UX and SEO both works as yin and yang. Their chemistry leads to the successful buying of any site's products. Today, we are going to help you understand how to implement faceted navigation for improved SEO and UX.
The Game Of Facets And Filters
- Filters
A filter is a tool used by the searcher to narrow down the results as per the demands of his own, for instance, you need a men's t-shirt in the diversity of all clothes, you will use filters like the size and the color that you desire that all comes in filters. (size-M,color-blue)
- Facets
Facets are the background backup of filters. They don't change on the search you will enter on a search engine. Hence, as earlier, you wanted an M-size t-shirt of blue color, so now you suddenly want a pair of jeans. Even when the products have changed, the size and color will remain the same on your screen.
That is what facets do. They don't change as per your searches. This causes problems for SEO as the duplicate sites start to pop in because the URLs have been made that were not present before.
Implementation Of Faceted Navigation For Improved SEO And UX:
Categorize them as:
- Put them in the index
- Don't index
- block crawl category
- First, see if there is enough search demand for the page; if not, delete it.
- If the page has a user value, then get it indexed.
- If there is sufficient inventory to support it, index it; if it doesn't, it should be left in the no index category.
- You can also assume an 'X number, so if the page has lower than 'x's no. of products, it should not be indexed and same for search demand.
- Protect Your Site
Identifying duplicate content and not getting it indexed will protect your authority for the pages that want to crawl. Determination of how the bots are crawling and indexing your site so you can fix problems regarding that.
Moreover, using the index to crawl ratio to ascertain how the number of pages index to the number of pages crawled can help you understand the problem's degree. Google search console and the screaming frogcan be used to crawl your site.
- Canonical Tags Should Be Set
After identifying a problem, and one needs to check the canonical tags on his website. Canonical tags help to tell Google that you have a preferred version of the things going around. So, that all URLs should lead to a rooted page for which the site has been canonized, and happily, that is your site.
- All Internal Links Should Be Applied With No Follow
If the internal link adds any pages carrying more than two facets, then it's best to use a no-follow tag to the link to preserve its equity. A no-follow tag prevents bots from crawling in.
- Use X-Robots-Tags Or Robots Meta Tag
Unwanted URLs are created in Faceted Navigation indexed by crawlers. Using a robot meta tag or x-robots-tag can keep that problem at bay. Using this tag can prevent and block any pages you don't want to be indexed. You need to add a no index tag in the <head> section of every page.
Nofollow can also be used such as, <meta name="robots"content=""index,no follow">. A huge number of pages on your sites makes it difficult to go through every page, so the solution is to use x-robots-tag.
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