Guided Navigation and SEO

[insight]

Hello,

I'm thinking about creating a site that uses "guided navigation". Such as someone picks a category (i.e. Televisions) and the navigation on the left becomes a list of different television attributes (i.e. brand, screen size, etc.) with numbers next to each attribute value specifying how many items match that criteria. Some examples of sites that use this sort of navigation are Circuit City, Pricegrabber and HomeDepot. It works like a search that you keep applying new filters to until you've narrowed the list of products down to what matches your needs.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on what the SEO ramifications of such a system would be?

Thanks!

[tedster]

A lot is going to depend on how the changes are generated technically, and if each change creates a change in the url.

[insight]

We would set up the rewrite system such that each page could be reached with just one clean URL (always www.example.com/televisions/19inch/sony/lcd.htm and never www.example.com/sony/televisions/lcd/19inch.htm etc.) The main concern is that this system will generate lots and lots of pages that might never get indexed.

Any thoughts on the indexing end of this situation?