Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs.
Gary Illyes from Google announced this saying, "We just published a new document about faceted navigation best practices, which was originally published as a blog post."
Google wrote on LinkedIn:
Regardless of what kind of site you have -- events, blog, or a shop --, there's a reasonable chance that your site is exposing URLs that are just a variation of something already discovered under a different URL. These duplicate URLs waste your "crawl budget" and your server resources; in fact the most common source of complaints we get about crawling can be traced back to these useless URL spaces, most often than not caused by faceted navigation.
Google's documentation says:
Faceted navigation is a common feature of websites that allows its visitors to change how items (for example, products, articles, or events) are displayed on a page. It's a popular and useful feature, however its most common implementation, which is based on URL parameters, can generate infinite URL spaces which harms the website in a couple ways:
- Overcrawling: Because the URLs created for the faceted navigation seem to be novel and crawlers can't determine whether the URLs are going to be useful without crawling first, the crawlers will typically access a very large number of faceted navigation URLs before the crawlers' processes determine the URLs are in fact useless.
- Slower discovery crawls: Stemming from the previous point, if crawling is spent on useless URLs, the crawlers have less time to spend on new, useful URLs.
Google then has sections on:
- Prevent crawling of faceted navigation URLs
- Ensure the faceted navigation URLs are optimal for the web
If you deal with any site that uses a form of faceted navigation, you will want to study this document.
Ryan Siddle from Merj expressed his concern with this, saying, "my concern is that this misses out a lot of useful information and a lot of context." He posted:
Back in 2017, we were using the URI fragment approach quite heavily. It was even picked up on Search Engine Roundtable when I commented about using fragments, to which the response was it wasn't a good idea.Fast forward to the end of 2024... Fragments are not a good idea. Here's just 5 initial why:
1. Not accessibility friendly (WCAG)
2. Problematic with social sharing for preview snippets
3. Not possible to SSR, we relied heavily on web workers which added latency.
4. Speed (see point 3 about additional latency)
5. It's very costly to implement. One dev agency estimated 14 days to implement. 9 months later, they were still struggling.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
