Can a navigation filter on my ecommerce site hurt rankings?

[eric1981]

It happens twice now,soon after I added navigation filter (i.e.:filter by color/price,etc.),my ranking dropped.

I am not sure about the connections here.And I hope some one may clarify this to me.

Thanks!

[tedster]

If the navigation filter changes the URL (it usually does) then disallow those newly established URLs in your robots.txt file. Otherwise it's like you doubled, tripled or more the number of pages on your site. In addition the potential for canonical issues takes a giant leap.

In fact, that points to another solution some people have been successful with - use the unfiltered URL as the canonical link on all the filtered pages. I don;t usually do this, because googlebot still needs to crawl all those URLs, and that can be an issue.

A third angle is similar - use Webmaster Tools to tell Google to ignore those filter parameters in the URL. In fact, there's no reason you couldn't do all three. If the robots.txt doesn't catch every edge case, or if there's a technical bobble somewhere along the line, then you've got other insurance in place.

[balibones]

Hello Eric,

Yes filters can hurt your rankings if they are not implemented correctly. There is a lot of information out there about how to do it correctly, but much of it depends on your site and situation. Some things to look into, for example:

- Having a rel canonical tag that references the unfiltered URL.
- Filtering without changing the URL (i.e. with javascript and divs)
- Follow, Noindex the filtered URLs (e.g. those with color=blue)

[eric1981]

thanks tedster and balibones.

And the filter that my sites use dooes not change the url.Does that hurt SEO?

[tedster]

Not usually - how does your filter work?