Faceted navigation and search engine optimization are two important phenomena in internet activities. In e-commerce, products could be seen or searched on the internet using faceted navigation. Consumers utilize this concept in any related product search. The filters used are pagination, content detail and many others. While in SEO angle, creating more pages that will show up aspects of other products is a major property.
The user resource locators (URLs) also give a platform to send links to other persons. This is to make the product viewable by other people. It is good to create many pages for indexing. After all, it gives choices to uses to display any contents available but it could be a disadvantage. It could get too much that search engines being in to see those incremental pages as thin content. Drop in traffic and the thin content penalty is a disadvantage of wrong faceted navigation of pages on a site.
In the e-commerce platforms, creating many pages in one site is most prominent. Looking at Zappos site, for example, they have different sections but we could take men’s shoes as an example. Assuming they have a shoe page and there is a price indexing, weight indexing, sizes indexing width indexing, colors indexing, and many other major characteristics indexing.
Each of these characteristics of the shoes will have another page in it again which will show the different specifications available. Like maybe size may have 6 different sizes available and maybe colors will have like 30 different colors. This is same in all other description details of the shoe. Multiplying it out, you can have well 8ver 100,000 potential pages for just the shoes. Other companies like Amazon will way different and may have over 20,000,000 pages in most categories. This just explains what a page indexing is all about.
Most small site owners keep asking why Amazon can index sites and they can’t. Well, the traffic on the sites can play a great role in ensuring the site still maintains stability even with the high number of pages indexed. Amazon controls traffic that many sites cannot. This has given them the strong edge over controlling the site stability even with their indexing of pages.
As much as Amazon can do this and be comfortable, there are certain disadvantages too especially when searching for a particular Amazon product on Google. They are able to rank non-optimal pages but not as good as they would if they restarting crawling to some pages. Although with all these research and conclusions about Amazon, Google still claims they treat every site as the same thing and don’t segregate sits when operating which looks true to an extent.
Requirements In Faceted Navigation Creation
In faceted navigation of pages in sites:-
1) The first rule is not to create faceted navigation pages with less than 1 product on them. It could be greater than 2 as well in some cases.
2) The second rule is not to index faceted navigation pages with less than a “y” which is the number you arrive at after testing.
After setting all these parameters, there must be a testing period. It is used to check the integrity of the values of “x” and “y” available, If you set “x” to 8 and “y” to 200 searches per month. Look at the outcome and it will determine if the numbered require reduction or increment.
In summary, faceted navigation is somewhat relevant to different sites. It must rightly be done so the site can function at full capacity.