faceted navigation
Filter combinations, size, colour, price, sort order, that each generate a URL, so that a catalogue of a hundred products can expose millions of addresses. It is the ordinary-case cause of a crawler trap, and the usual reason crawl budget is spent on pages that all show the same items.
What faceted navigation means
The fix is a rule about which combinations are canonical, which are noindexed, and which are blocked; case consistency in the parameter names is the related failure, since ?Color= and ?color= are two more URLs.
Terms this definition uses
Product · Crawler trap · crawl budget · canonical · noindex · case consistency · Parameter
Related terms in Indexing and discovery
Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.
index coverage · canonical · noindex · X-Robots-Tag · orphan page · E-E-A-T · E-E-A-T proxies · topical authority · Soft 404 · case consistency · accessibility structure · landmark region · accessible name · skip link · main landmark · alt attribute · form control name · duplicate id · IndexNow · thin content · duplicate content · near-duplicate · boilerplate · MinHash · shingle · dead anchor · placeholder content · image placeholder · alt text · EXIF
Questions about faceted navigation
What is faceted navigation?
Filter combinations, size, colour, price, sort order, that each generate a URL, so that a catalogue of a hundred products can expose millions of addresses. It is the ordinary-case cause of a crawler trap, and the usual reason crawl budget is spent on pages that all show the same items.
Which area of the glossary does faceted navigation belong to?
Indexing and discovery: Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.
← IndexNow · thin content →
See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.