Faceted search is a search function that lets users filter results by various properties. This makes it possible to narrow down large volumes of products, articles or content more quickly.
This type of search is used particularly often in online shops. There, users can filter by price, brand, colour, size or availability, for example.
How does a faceted search work?
In a faceted search, several filters are combined at the same time. Each selected property further reduces the number of results shown.
Typical filters are:
- price
- brand
- colour
- size
- category
- ratings
- availability
A user could, for example, search for ”sneakers” and then display only black models in size 42 under 100 euros.
Why faceted searches are important for SEO
Faceted searches improve the user experience because visitors find suitable content more quickly. At the same time, they can become problematic from an SEO perspective when a separate URL is created for every filter combination.
This often results in a large number of similar pages with little added value of their own. Without clean technical control, this can lead to duplicate content, crawling problems and poorer indexing.
From an SEO point of view, faceted searches should therefore be controlled deliberately, for example with canonical tags, noindex rules or a clear URL structure.