Degree of Faceted Navigation and SEO

While searching for a product through an ecommerce website, you may be able to find your product much conveniently and efficiently if the ecommerce website’s navigation is faceted. This is how the navigation of ecommerce websites is designed. There are variety of filters, page orders and paginations which allow users to search for the products belonging to different categories in the most convenient way.

Looking at faceted navigation from SEO standpoint, it is a good thing. It involves creation of pages that allow users to view products in the way they would want. It gives you an edge over the competitors because users tend to stay on your website to search for the products within your site. And since there are going to be many pages which would get generated due to application of filters, the users can share links with others, giving you another SEO advantage.

What is too much of a good thing?

Yu may have heard that too much of a good thing is bad. This statement is quite right in the scenario when you create too many of the pages. The creation of too many pages makes the pages to be treated as places with thin content by search engine. And if you go a bit too far with this approach, you may start getting thin content penalty. However, it is not all about the penalty. Too many pages lead to the dropped traffic.

With filters, set orders, and paginations, you actually let the users create pages with the help of these features. And these pages get in the spotlight of search engines if the same kinds of filters are applied again and again. While this process can lead to the indexation of the pages, there is a chance the too many of the pages will get created; and this is what makes the pages seem to have thin content.

Now, many people may wonder how Amazon pages get indexed fairly quickly even though this ecommerce site has a lot of pages. Well, Amazon is a giant in ecommerce industry and it is pretty much an uphill task for other sites to compete with it. The reputation and demand of an ecommerce website are the factors which come into play in this regard. In other words, the freedom in page creation is quite dependent on the demand of the website. Nevertheless, there are some areas where many Amazon pages fail as well.

Another reason for the Amazon to rank high may be due to the fact that they restrict the crawling in many of the pages which don’t seem much valuable. Furthermore, they tend to get each of their product page indexed on first place. This strategy cannot work well for the other sites and this is the reason that they need to stick with the strategy of getting their categories indexed.

The right approach in this regard is to restrict the crawling of certain pages and categories which do not have much of the value for both search engines and the users. You can work on all of the other valuable aspects of your website in order to give it a SEO advantage.