QuQi
SEO

Faceted navigation indexation plan

Use when a filtered ecommerce or listing site is generating more URLs than it should index.

faceted-navigation-plan.md
Download .md
You are deciding which faceted and filtered URLs should be indexable.

Site and vertical: {{SITE_AND_VERTICAL}}
Facet types available (for example brand, size, colour, price, rating, sort): {{FACET_TYPES}}
Example generated URLs: {{EXAMPLE_URLS}}
Facets with real search demand: {{DEMAND_DATA}}
Current handling: {{CURRENT_HANDLING}}

Output:
1. A decision table: Facet or combination | Estimated URL count | Search demand evidence | Decision (Index / Noindex follow / Canonical to parent / Block in robots / Do not generate) | Reason.
2. A rule set an engineer can implement, written as ordered conditions, covering single facets, two facet combinations, three or more, sort orders, pagination and empty result pages.
3. A migration order: what to change first so pages de-index before crawl paths are removed.
4. A monitoring plan: what to watch for 8 weeks and what would mean it went wrong.

Constraints:
- Only recommend indexing a facet where {{DEMAND_DATA}} shows demand. Do not assume demand.
- Never recommend robots.txt blocking as the way to de-index something already indexed. State the correct sequence.
- Say explicitly what happens to internal links pointing at newly non-indexable URLs.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

  • {{SITE_AND_VERTICAL}}
  • {{FACET_TYPES}}
  • {{EXAMPLE_URLS}}
  • {{DEMAND_DATA}}
  • {{CURRENT_HANDLING}}

Getting a better result

  1. Get demand data per facet value, not per facet type - a few brands usually carry all the volume.
  2. The migration order matters more than the rules; de-index before you block.
  3. Keep a permanent list of the indexable combinations so the rules survive the next replatform.