Ecommerce: Should You Create More Indexable Pages or Consolidate?

Introduction

When building an ecommerce site, SEO professionals face a common dilemma: Should you create more indexable pages to expand your ranking footprint or consolidate pages to limit crawling and indexing demands?
A larger site can capture more organic traffic through niche queries, including those with little or no reported search volume, provided the site has sufficient authority.
Some SEOs favor a consolidated approach, keeping product-filtering URLs out of the index and grouping product variants on single pages. Others recommend making filtered URLs indexable and splitting product variants into separate listings.
Which approach works best, and when should you use each?

What are product-filtering, or faceted navigation, URLs?

These URLs exist on most large ecommerce sites. Let’s look at an example:

• https://www.redletterdays.co.uk/food-drink
  This is the food and drink experiences page on the Red Letter Days site. It’s a fully indexable page. But what if we click the “Location” button and apply a filter?
  
  Applying a location filter narrows the results to food and drink experiences in the North West region of the UK. The filter adds parameters to the URL, which is then blocked from crawling by robots.txt rules that disallow all filtered URLs.
  This means that users searching for UK food and drink experiences would be likely to find the Red Letter Days food and drink page. However, if they were specifically searching for food and drink experiences in the North West region, they would be less likely to find this page — since it’s blocked from crawling.
  Robots.txt is just a directive. It doesn’t prevent Google from viewing or indexing the page. Google may choose to ignore the instruction. Usually, though, Google will adhere to crawl blocking, and such pages will fall out of the index.
  This strategy of crawl blocking or deindexing all filter URLs is pretty common.

Why do large sites often block filtered-product URLs?

Crawl budget preservation is the main reason. In this example, Red Letter Days has 1,669 food and drink experience listings:

Here are the counts of location, price, and brand filters:

• Location — 19 possible regions/filters
• Price — six price-based filters
• Brand — 100 brand-based filters
  If we add these up, that means the page can have 125 child variants with parameters applied. But that’s not the end of the math.
  The Location, Price, and Brand filters can all be combined by selecting one item from each. For example:
• https://www.redletterdays.co.uk/food-drink?filter=&Region=West+Midlands&Price=%C2%A3150+-+%C2%A3250&Brand=Birmingham+Brewing+Company
  The full calculation is more like this:
• 4,140 = (19 + 1) x (6 + 1) x (100 + 1)
  Each filter has to be multiplied by the other filters. In addition, each must have a “+1” for the unfiltered result, in case a particular filter is left unapplied.
  That single food and drink results page now has over 14,000 potential URLs. Adding more filters multiplies the possible combinations.
  Most ecommerce sites aren’t authoritative enough to have all their filtered URLs indexed. Google may make special efforts to index these URLs at scale for retail giants. But unless your site has comparable authority, you’ll likely need to take measures to control crawling and indexing.

How to decide which filtered URLs to index

Indexing hundreds of thousands of filtered URLs can overwhelm Google, but some combinations could drive valuable niche traffic.
Use keyword research to identify these opportunities, then selectively turn promising filter combinations into indexable pages with clean URLs and unique content.
Here’s the food and drink page from Experiences.co.uk:

• https://www.experiences.co.uk/food-and-drink/
  In this example, the filter creates a typical parameter URL. The page is soft-deindexed via canonical tags. This tells Google it’s not the main parent URL and shouldn’t be indexed.
  But now, let’s try another filter:
  
  You can see above that this page also has a unique splash of content.
  Here, keyword research helped the team identify dynamically filtered pages worth making indexable. This selective approach allows the site to target valuable search queries without requiring Google to index every possible filter combination.

When should you transform filtered URLs into true ecommerce pages?

• Don’t index every filter: The number of possible URL combinations can grow exponentially, creating unnecessary crawling and indexing demands.
• Don’t block every filter either: Some combinations may target valuable niche search queries and represent missed organic traffic opportunities.
• Use keyword research to identify opportunities: Prioritize filter combinations with genuine search demand.
• Turn valuable filters into proper landing pages: Give them clean URLs, unique content, and dedicated metadata. Allow them to be indexed.
• Control the rest: Use an appropriate crawling and indexing strategy for low-value filter combinations.
  Ultimately, the goal is simple: Index pages that could drive valuable organic traffic, not every URL your filters can mechanically generate.