Best & Worst Practices for Faceted Navigation Systems

Google posted a Faceted navigation best (and 5 of the worst) practices resource to their blog that is a bit on the Advanced side, but if you're managing a large and complicated eccommerce navigation system then it's a resource you can't afford to miss. However, the topic itself is too complex for us to cover in its entirety within this update and after much debate we decided it was a touch too niche to dedicate an article to the topic so here's the short version...

Many ecommerce sites offer navigation systems that allow customers to filter their category or search results by different features such as: price, color, brand, etc. These Faceted Navigation results can often result in multiple URLs for the same product page as well as many different category pages with the same content arranged in different ways. These URLs end up resulting in undesirable duplication with no value to your overall rankings in Google.

Google gives you direct advise against using parameters as directories, for example:

yourdomain.com/product?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy&sid=789
is better than
yourdomain.com/c123/s789/product?swedish-fish

Google lays out some clear examples to properly handle this type of large site. So, if your site allows users to sort and filter your products, this is a post you don't want to skip over. Go read it here.