Case Study: How Wayfair Structures Their Faceted Navigation

Transcription: 

Hi, I’m Chris Long, and welcome to another episode of “60-Second SEO”.

Today we’re going to go over the unique case study of how Wayfair handles their faceted navigation.

Here I’m on their “Comforters and Comforter Sets” page. And let’s say I use the faceted navigation to drill down into something a little more specific. Let’s say I want to see “Twin” comforters. I select “Twin”. The URL changes to include “/sb1/”. This is an indexable URL. The “Twin Comforter Sets” page can be indexed.

Let’s say I want to sort by a color. So “Blue Twin Comforters”. Here I’m in “Blue Twin Comforter Sets”. The URL changes to “/sb2/”. This is still indexable.

However, let’s say I want to add a third. Say I want to sort by pattern and I want to go to “Plaid”. Here we can see the URL changes to include this “/filters/” path in the URL slug. When I go to the robots.txt file, zooming in a bit. You can see that they actually disallow all /filters/.

So here what they’re allowing the faceted navigation to do is allow Google to index any page with two parameters selected. But if you select a third parameter, that’s probably too deep for Google to want to index, it actually completely disallows it by changing the URL path.

A really creative use of faceted navigation and one case study any technical SEO should definitely be reviewing.

About Chris Long

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital. With 10+ years of SEO experience, Chris works unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology. Chris has advised on the search strategies for clients such as GEICO, Adobe & The New York Times. He is a contributor for Moz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. He is also a speaker at industry conferences such as MozCon, SMX East, BrightonSEO and more.