Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    2
    4
    1114
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • viatrading1
      viatrading1 last edited by

      Hi,

      We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/

      We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product.

      All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/

      Is this the best practice?

      Thanks,

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Joe_Stoffel
        Joe_Stoffel @viatrading1 last edited by

        Hi there,

        If you want to provide these different sorting/filtering options, faceted navigation is going to be your best option. As I mentioned above, with this approach you need to utilize nofollow, noindex, robots.txt and canonical tags to communicate to search engines where duplicate content will occur.

        In the example you provided (masonry or list), you would want a single URL for both views otherwise you are presenting new opportunities for duplicate content.

        Happy to discuss further if you have any additional questions!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • viatrading1
          viatrading1 last edited by

          Hi Joe,

          On our case, in which we want to have filters and be able to access a filtered URL, is there a better option than faceted navigation?

          In this case - since we want to show the same product in different formats (e.g. masonry or list), should we have a different URL for each view?

          Thanks,

          Joe_Stoffel 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Joe_Stoffel
            Joe_Stoffel last edited by

            Hi there,

            Generally, faceted URLs are not a best practice for SEO. I suggest you review Google's best and worst practice guidelines for faceted navigation, you can find that here. According to Google, this is often not search-friendly "since it creates many combinations of URLs with duplicative content. With duplicative URLs, search engines may not crawl new or updated unique content as quickly, and/or they may not index a page accurately because indexing signals are diluted between the duplicate versions."

            However, If your canonical tags are in place to handle the different parameter/filter URLs that are being created (which will resolve duplicate content issues) you should be fine. Hope this helps!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            Browse Questions

            Explore more categories

            • Moz Tools

              Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

            • SEO Tactics

              Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

            • Community

              Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

            • Digital Marketing

              Chat about tactics outside of SEO

            • Research & Trends

              Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

            • Support

              Connect on product support and feature requests.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • CarolynSC

              Does google ignore ? in url?

              Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC
              0
            • jayoliverwright

              Duplicate URLs ending with #!

              Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
              0
            • SWD.Advertising

              Best practice for H1 on site without H1 - Alternative methods?

              I have recently set up a mens style blog - the site is made up of articles pulled in from a CMS and I am wanting to keep the design as clean as possible - so no text other than the articles. This makes it hard to get a H1 tag into the page - are there any solutions/alternatives? that would be good for SEO? The site is http://www.iamtheconnoisseur.com/ Thanks

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising
              0
            • RG_SEO

              Best practice for retiring old product pages

              We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO
              0
            • WebRiverGroup

              What is the best way to handle special characters in URLs

              What is the best way to handle special characters? We have some URL's that use special characters and when a sitemap is generate using Xenu it changes the characters to something different. Do we need to have physically change the URL back to display the correct character? Example: URL:  http://petstreetmall.com/Feeding-&-Watering/361.html Sitmap Link:  http://www.petstreetmall.com/Feeding-%26-Watering/361.html

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup
              0
            • komeksimas

              Where to put a page ID in a URL?

              Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
              Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
              0
            • AndreVanKets

              Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?

              Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
              oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
              oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
              oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
              oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
              oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
              oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
              oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
              oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
              oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
              oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
              oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
              oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
              oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
              oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
              oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
              1
            • Damiano

              Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language

              One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian. The English pages are available at the root level:
              www.site.com/   English homepage www.site.com/page1
              www.site.com/page2 The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
              www.site.com/it   Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
              www.site.com/it/pagina2 When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way... It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use? Thank you

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Damiano
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.