Faceted Navigation and SEO: How to Avoid Crawl Traps

Let’s talk about filters. Specifically those checkboxes on ecommerce sites that let you narrow down by size, colour, brand, price, and whatever else. It’s super helpful for us as customers. But behind the screens? They can be an absolute nightmare for SEO.

Here’s why: every time a user ticks a box, your site can generate a new URL. So one page of shoes can suddenly become thousands, and in some cases, even millions, of slightly different URLs that all show pretty much the same stuff. Google sees that, and can’t even begin to comprehend what to do with all of that information. 

Understanding URL Explosion

It snowballs fast. Say you’ve got 10 filters with 5 options each. That’s over 9 million possible combinations - most of which contain nearly identical products. Google tries to crawl them all, wastes its time, and misses your important pages.

That’s what we call a crawl trap, and Google hates them.

Strategic Filter Management

So, what should you do instead? First, get smart about which filtered views actually matter. Something like “red Nike trainers” might be a combo worth keeping. But “size 7, green, under £50, waterproof” probably isn’t.

Here’s the strategy: Block most of those combo URLs in your robots.txt so Google doesn’t go crawling every possible filter path.

Use canonical tags to tell Google which page is the main version when content doesn’t really change.

Noindex thin pages that don’t add value, but still work for user filtering.

And use tools like Search Console’s URL Parameters setting to guide how Google handles these filters and reduce your crawl waste. 

Technical Implementation Solutions

If you're using filters just for user experience, you don’t always need them to create new URLs. Instead, you can use JavaScript to update the product list without touching the URL — but make sure important filtered content is still crawlable if it’s something people actually search for.

For the really popular combinations? Don’t rely on dynamic filters - build proper landing pages that target actual search intent. Not only are they helpful to customers, they’re better for SEO.