Let the site's faceted navigation no longer headaches building perfect pagination navigation

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The original text from SEOmoz, has been very want to translate the article, the author in February, wrote an "E-commerce platform elements and Skills" (later have time to translate it), which is very important point is the faceted navigation (facet navigation), which is a term in IA. Some people in China call them level two navigation or secondary navigation. OK, it doesn't matter what you call it, it's just a very difficult thing to build a good faceted navigation system in a large and medium sized station because of the intricate factors that need to be considered.

Developers and SEO must have heard the search engine will often be prompted to say: Do not seo for SEO, preference for users

If you ask me what part of the site you're talking about? Unfortunately, most of them are for faceted navigation. If you can not consider the search engine to build a faceted navigation system, it is a perfect thing. Unfortunately, that is not the case. In this article, I will try to break the things that are done for both search engines and users.

Before we start, let's look at the definition of faceted navigation, which often appears on e-commerce sites, allowing users to filter thousands of products using filters (well, or faceted). We will see them on many b2b/b2c websites. For example, Beijing East or Alibaba. As shown ...

In the example above, I filter some conditions to select the product I want most:

1. I want a Notebook

2. My father is Li Gang, I am going to have a 12127.html "> Apple Notebook

3. Ditto for the reason, so I have to buy more than 10000

4. The same reason, how to say the screen also have to pick the largest

As a user, I can use these filters to select the product I want.

For search engines, there will be a series of adverse consequences.

Primary faceted Navigation

Search engine will start to crawl these facets, regardless of the consequences of grasping these filter pages and index them, eventually tired, the reptiles left your site, the following figure

This is a relatively low-level approach to the establishment of faceted navigation (night interest note: It seems that there are a lot of domestic standing with this "low-end" method, hehe) because it allows all pages are crawled and indexed, hope that the search engine itself can identify what important what is not important. Friendship reminder: In fact, many times those important pages are not search engine love AH.

Can I use NOINDEX or nofollow?

A lot of electric dealer website uses Robots=noindex or nofollow as a solution, but these really cannot bring too many help, each method has its weakness.

noindex– this thing can really get these ugly, overly categorized pages blocked from indexing, but it doesn't stop crawlers wasting time and bandwidth on these pages.

nofollow– (Night interest: I will write on my own, the original point of view is a bit of a problem, Nofollow for Google is a good way, but for Baidu, Nofollow links just do not pass weight and anchor text. And nofollow can only stop the crawler from this page, and can not from other pages, or even external links to stop the crawler, anyway, using nofollow is certainly not the most perfect way to save bandwidth.

Another less-than-good way ...

Some sites use robots to prevent spiders from crawling these faceted pages. For example, I only let the crawler crawl to the "notebook" this category, and then down similar to the "Apple Notebook", "HP Notebook" of the faceted will not let search engines crawling. The result is that the "notebook" will be indexed, and the "Apple Notebook" will not be indexed.

The downside is that it's easy to lose a lot of landing pages that bring in a lot of search traffic. Jingdong, for example, would he just want "notebook" traffic rather than "Apple notebook" traffic? The answer is obviously not. So why is this not a very good way.

So how do we build a perfect faceted navigation?

Excellent faceted navigation must be guided by the following principles:

1. Simple and easy to use

2. Do not let the search engine arbitrarily grab the faceted

3. Allow the search engine to crawl certain categories that can bring high value traffic.

It's easier said than done, let's see how we can achieve these goals.

Solution 1:ajax

It's not known that Ajax SEO is almost extinct these days. Two years ago, Google-represented search engines have taken a big step forward in capturing Ajax content, and see Google's official blog How to get your Ajax content crawled by crawlers. Webmasters are now able to let the site's Ajax content by Google Crawl! (Night note: The mother is not yet) The web site has benefited from the changes in the user experience brought about by Ajax technology.

In our example, I intend to use Ajax to do a site's faceted navigation, and let search engines can crawl to the faceted page. There are a small number of E-commerce platforms now.

For JavaScript-enabled users

Ajax allows users to choose and remove filters faster and easier to use. In this case I, we want an AJAX faceted navigation that can't be crawled. These subdivisions are entirely for the user to consider.

This is the static page of Oakley glasses, we can filter randomly on the page, the page will not be overloaded, the URL will not change, but the product can be filtered out correctly.

Disable JavaScript users and all search engines

This is at the heart of the whole approach, we've created a static HTML page that doesn't use Ajax, and the facets above are manually selected, linked to deeper HTML pages, and these pages are the first to count the pages that bring in a lot of search traffic. #p # subtitle #e#

Let's explain

When we shop on such a website, the user who opens JavaScript sees

This navigation is generated when the page is loaded through JS, but when users who disable JS (including search engines) arrive, it stops, instead:

Now, we've added a page called "popular classification" that has been crawled. Search engines will be able to crawl these pages can bring a lot of traffic. (Night note: The author said that he had never seen a Web site do so, I feel that someone should think of it)

Wait, isn't this a fake page?

The disguise page actually refers to the user and the search engine to display different content. In my opinion this is not a disguise page, in fact I think Google may also like such a page. Put aside the search engine to consider, if your site happens to visit a disabled JS users, the Pure AJAX navigation page is not to let him crazy. Google, in line with the principle of user experience first, does not recognize such behavior as cheating. (Night interest note: Google is indeed a bigger belly of the search engine, think of the logo with CSS anchor text drift out of the case, this is even less user experience, purely for seo,google will not punish you)

Solution 2: Selective use of Robots.txt

This method can be said to be the beginning of the lower-end of this article, the upgrade version of the method, through the URL tag, we can mark in the robots which pages to be caught, which pages do not get caught. Alibaba www.alibaba.com, for example, has one of their robots.txt files: disallow:/products/

Then, in the faceted navigation of Alibaba International station, the/products/directory is shielded as unwanted faceted. And also used nofollow, (Night interest note: Red dotted box means nofollow, General SEO plug-ins have this function, the picture is a bit ugly, embarrassed)

From this diagram we can guess that the regional + keyword page traffic or conversion rate is relatively high, Alibaba just let these pages be crawled, as for those subdivision of the page is not here let search engine grabbed it, because there are other entrances, this side will sell a case, interested students to study it himself.

Two ways to make excellent faceted navigation, but I prefer the first AJAX approach, which takes more care of the user experience.

Are there more methods and cases?

I want more people to improve their navigation systems and become more ingenious and precise. This is equivalent to the visitor's "radar" system. If you know other excellent faceted navigation implementation methods, please tell me and talk to you about the exchange.

Author: Night Interest http://yexi.co.cc/?p=348 welcome reprint, please keep the source