Google’s Top Crawling Challenges: Faceted Navigation & More
▼ Summary
– Google’s 2025 year-end report identified faceted navigation and action parameters as the biggest crawling challenges, comprising about 75% of issues.
– These crawling problems can severely impact a website by overloading servers, slowing performance, and making the site inaccessible.
– Faceted navigation, a common e-commerce feature, accounts for 50% of challenges by creating infinite URL variations from filters like size and color.
– Action parameters (25%) and irrelevant parameters like session IDs (10%) are other major causes that mislead or confuse Google’s crawlers.
– A clean URL structure is essential for server health, page load speed, and ensuring search engines correctly identify a site’s canonical pages.
In a recent discussion, Google’s team shed light on the most significant technical hurdles their web crawlers encountered over the past year. These issues, primarily stemming from problematic URL structures, can severely impact a website’s performance and search visibility. The two biggest culprits, faceted navigation and action parameters, together account for roughly three-quarters of all crawling problems identified. Addressing these is not just about SEO; it’s about maintaining server health and ensuring a smooth experience for all visitors.
When Google’s automated bots, known as crawlers, encounter problematic URLs, the consequences can be serious for a website owner. These issues can cause servers to become overloaded, leading to slow page loads or even making a site temporarily inaccessible. The core problem lies in how crawlers process URLs. As explained by Google’s Gary Illyes, once a crawler discovers a problematic set of URLs, it often must explore a large portion of that URL space before it can determine the content is low-value or duplicative. By that point, the damage is often already done, with the site’s performance suffering.
The annual analysis pinpointed several specific areas where websites commonly create obstacles for search engine crawlers.
Approximately half of all crawling challenges are tied to faceted navigation. This is a prevalent feature on e-commerce sites where users can filter products by countless attributes like size, color, or price. Each filter combination can generate a unique URL, creating a near-infinite maze of similar pages for crawlers to navigate, often without substantial unique content.
Another quarter of the issues stem from action parameters within URLs. These are parameters that trigger a specific function, such as adding an item to a cart or changing a sort order, without meaningfully altering the core content of the page itself. Crawlers can waste valuable resources indexing these procedural URLs.
Roughly 10% of problems involve irrelevant parameters. These include elements like session IDs or tracking codes (e.g., UTM parameters) appended to URLs. While useful for analytics, they create multiple URLs for the same page content, confusing search engines about which version is canonical.
An additional 5% are linked to plugins or widgets. Certain third-party tools can dynamically generate URLs or alter site structure in ways that inadvertently create crawling traps or duplicate content issues.
The remaining small percentage is attributed to miscellaneous “weird stuff,” a catch-all category for oddities like double-encoded URLs that can break normal crawling patterns.
The importance of resolving these issues extends far beyond search rankings. A clean, logical URL structure is fundamental for three key reasons: it preserves server resources and health, it ensures pages load quickly for users, and it provides clear signals to search engines about your site’s primary content. By eliminating these common URL traps, webmasters can foster a healthier, more crawlable website that performs better for both people and algorithms.
(Source: Search Engine Land)
