One webmaster asked John during his hangout on 09/10/2021 about specifics on their e-commerce website. More specifically, about filter and search pages.
Their question was about their site, which has a lot of variants and search queries for many different products. They use filter pages, and these are optimized and indexable. But they don’t get indexed.
John explained that Google doesn’t try to recognize the difference between different category pages, filter pages, or search pages. Google sees all of these types of pages as being equivalent.
This happens at approximately the 32:01 mark in the video:
John Mueller Hangout 09/10/2021 Transcript
We have a new e-commerce store with lots of different variants and search queries for products. For example, we sell diamond cutting discs. These have search queries, like diamond cutting disc for tiles, wood, concrete. Our competitors are ranked with their own categories for these products. We use filter pages, which are optimized and they’re also indexable. But the filter pages don’t get ranked or don’t get indexed. So should I create hundreds of unusable subcategories instead?
John (answer) 32:31
So I think, first of all, the one important aspect here is that we don’t try to recognize the difference between different category pages or filter pages or search pages. Essentially, we see all of these pages as being equivalent. And it’s more a matter of the kind of content that you’re providing there. So it’s, it’s kind of similar to in the past, we would get questions, like if I do a blog post, if I set up a separate page for a piece of content, does Google treat that differently. And again, it’s not we treat—we don’t treat kind of like the semantic thing that you have set up on your site separately. But rather, we recognize on this page, there are lots of products that are linked here. And there’s information about this kind of product on this page.
And we’ll take that into account. And it doesn’t matter for us if this is a category page, a search page, a tag page, a filter page. Essentially, it’s one URL that has this, this kind of information on it. So from that point of view, I don’t think you artificially need to create something special on your website. But rather, if you’re trying to get these kinds of pages to appear in search, you just need to make sure I mean, just need to make sure that you have the right amount of useful information on these pages so that when we look at these pages, we can recognize, oh, here’s some information about the type of page that it is, here’s a clean heading on this page, maybe there’s a subheading there as well.
Maybe there are links for additional context. And there’s a list of products that we can follow and also go off and crawl and index. And that’s, that’s essentially what we’d be looking for. And if you’re seeing that none of these pages on your site are being crawled or indexed, then the first thing I would look into is kind of the technical side of things is crawling or indexing of these pages blocked somehow. Is there a canonical setup? Is there no index, perhaps set up by your shop system, all of those kinds of things?
But if you’re seeing that some of these pages are being indexed, and ranking, but not all of them, then I assume from a technical point of view, they’re fine. And it’s more a matter of well, we don’t know enough about these pages to actually go off and crawl and index them. So you could do things like look at your internal linking structure and see what you can do to make it so that we can find those pages a little bit easier.
And that could be something like on your homepage, you list a section of popular categories or popular kinds of products. And then you link to those pages directly. Or maybe you do occasional blog posts with information about a specific kind of product. And then from there, you link to that kind of product page on your site, which could be like a filter page, it could be a category page, whatever you want to do.
