Are facets and categories the same thing?

Question

I am currently working on an eCommerce website, which typically have the following URL structural examples:

 1. www.example.com/paintings/flowers/roses/
 2. www.example.com/paintings/flowers/roses/abstract/
 3. www.example.com/paintings/flowers/roses/black-white/

Whilst the above pages target high search volume keywords, they do feel rather 'messy'. As such, I have been thinking of integrating a Faceted Navigation.

What I am thinking of, is having the following URL structure:

www.example.com/paintings/flowers/

On the above URL, then have the following Facet titles:

1. Subject: Roses, Violets, Sunflowers etc.
2. Colour: Red, Yellow, Black & White etc.
3. Style: Abstract, Fine Art, Figurative etc.

Personally, I feel this would provide a better user experience as well as organising the pages a little better; removing excessive amounts of Product Categories.

Where I have come a little stuck, is in establishing the difference between a Facet and a Child Category; primarily when it comes to SEO.

The obvious difference being the URL. The 'simple' URL, would be:

www.example.com/parent-category/child-category/

with a Facet URL, looking more like:

www.example.com/shop/?color=red&style=abstract&subject=roses

My question, really, is three fold:

1. Is a Facet, simply a Child Category?
2. Does that mean, a Facet merely pulls the products from their associated Child Categories and outputs them to the page, the Facet is on?
3. Is a Facet completely separate to Categories? Therefore, Child Categories still need to be created with the Facet being assigned the noindex tag or even a Canonical tag?

Ultimately, I am trying to avoid the issue of duplicate content whilst maintaining organised Product Categories.

Answer 1

Where I have come a little stuck, is in establishing the difference between a Facet and a Child Category; primarily when it comes to SEO.

Stephen Ostermiller's answer to your previous question already addresses most of this, so I won't repeat it.

To expand on the SEO aspect, though, the primary issue with facets is needing to manage how they're crawled and what is returned in SERPs.

For example, a single category with a handful of filters could create hundreds of near duplicate pages which we don't want to be indexed and, for larger sites, might not want to be crawled either.

Whilst the above pages target high search volume keywords, they do feel rather 'messy'. As such, I have been thinking of integrating a Faceted Navigation.

It sounds like your subcategories likely serve actual demand. In my opinion, it would be unwise to cease to meet such demand because you feel it's messy.

Answer 2

I think the simple URLs with directories looks cleaner for users. They're shorter URLs and therefore easier for people to type into their browser bar, and they're more visible when users are looking at their past browsing history in the address bar dropdown.

The facet URLs that you're talking about are generally used by sites that have search engines and act more as query parameters. These sites are often pulling those query parameters off of their databases and usually work in JSON language.

So when you'd see a URL such as: ?color=red&style=abstract&subject=roses

Usually the above URL means that the server is querying the SUBJECT database for "roses", and out of those results, only find STYLE tags of "abstract" that have the COLOR "red". The server reads the URL and pulls the parameters to search its database, whereas simple URLs don't have parameters in them so a database can't be queried in the same way.

The facet URL probably isn't structured in the most efficient way for users, but is more useful for the server.

Ultimately, the URL preference is yours. But the faceted URLs are more for machine structuring and not for users, simple URLs are structured for users.

From Googlebot's perspective, having a facet URL like ?color=red&style=abstract&subject=roses would probably cause it to see the keywords as being "color-red-style-abstract-subject-roses" when you're actually trying to target "red-abstract-roses".

So I don't know if from an SEO perspective if the facet URLs are better than the simple ones. My opinion is that they're actually not.