Glossary
Faceted navigation
Filters that generate URLs — usually far too many of them.
What it is
Faceted navigation is the filter layer on category pages: brand, size, colour, price. Each combination can produce its own URL, and with a handful of facets that becomes thousands of pages.
Why it costs you money
Left unmanaged it duplicates content, splits ranking signals and burns crawl budget. Managed well, the combinations people actually search for become valuable landing pages and the rest stay usable but unindexed.
How to check it yourself
Decide explicitly which combinations deserve indexing, keep the rest out with canonical and robots rules, and check what a crawler sees on a filtered URL.
Where this matters