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Dustin Collis

Tech Tips: Faceted Navigation

October 24th, 2011

Technical

When developing a site that has a faceted navigation interface, it’s important to make sure it doesn’t become a content trap for Search Engines or bots.  There are dozens of ways to block bots and search engines from your site, but many people want the external links and knowledge sharing.  This can come at a cost however, as your site is bombed by thousands and thousands of page requests from incoming search engines and bots.  Enough, in some cases, to inflate your page count (and bandwidth usage) to more than 10 times your actual site usage by real site visitors.  Instead of discussing outright blocking strategies – let’s focus on how you can construct your facet pages to easily give search engines and bots what they want: your content.

Hide your facets

An easy way to give search engines a path to all of your content is to hide all of your facets, but give them pagination to sort through each of the items.  This depends on your overall facet strategy, but many faceted navigation systems have pagination of the full set of content to augment the winnowing nature of the faceted system.

This is an example of a standard browser looking at a faceted navigation page:

This example is what Google would see:

The second example lets the search engine spider all of the content, but hides the facets that can cause hundreds of thousands of page requests by confused and zealous spiders and bots.

This is the first blog in a series about faceted navigation, so stay tuned for more tips and feel free to drop me a line with any questions you might have.