Faceted navigation and SEO: what to index and what not to

Faceted navigation (filters by brand, colour, price or feature) is essential in any medium-sized catalogue. The problem is that every filter combination is a URL, and with just a few filters you already get thousands.

The criterion: does anyone search for it?

• “Salomon trail running shoes” has searches → it deserves an indexable page.
• “Red Salomon trail running shoes size 42 from €80 to €100” does not → it should not be indexed.

A practical strategy

1. By default, filter URLs set to noindex, follow with the canonical pointing to the category.
2. For the few combinations with real demand, landing pages with a clean URL, title, description and their own text. They can be subcategories or pages created with an SEO landing page module.
3. Block in robots.txt the parameters that never add value (sort order, number of results).

In PrestaShop

The official faceted search module (ps_facetedsearch) builds filter URLs from the names of groups and values. Some implications:

• Renaming a feature changes all its filter URLs.
• Filter names depend on the language: in a multilingual store, each language has its own URLs.
• When changing theme or version, check that the filter structure is still the same, or redirect.