Faceted Navigation
The filter system that lets shoppers narrow a category by colour, size, material, price, and brand, which is simultaneously the largest crawl trap on a retail site and its most productive source of long-tail demand.
Analogy Mental model
A room with ten rotating kaleidoscope filters. Ten colours times eight sizes times five materials times six price bands produces millions of near-identical URLs, and letting a crawler into all of them means it never reaches your new products.
In practice What you actually do
Split the filters into two classes. Block and exclude anything without independent search demand: sorting, price bands, rating filters, size, and any combination of three or more attributes. Then promote the small set of one and two attribute combinations people genuinely search for into clean static URLs with their own titles.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Handled well, this releases thousands of commercial long-tail terms without writing a single article. Handled badly, it consumes the entire crawl budget and leaves the important pages unvisited.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →