Faceted Navigation SEO in Magento 2: How to Keep URLs Clean and Crawlable with Hyvä + ElasticSuite

Faceted navigation is essential for Magento 2 stores with large catalogs. It helps users refine products quickly but from an SEO perspective, it can generate millions of filter combinations, leading to duplicate content, wasted crawl budget, and ranking dilution. In this article, we explain how developers can implement SEO-safe faceted navigation in Hyvä + ElasticSuite environments, and why qoliber’s SEO: Pretty Filter URLs is the go-to solution for keeping URLs short and indexable.

1. Why Faceted Navigation Breaks SEO

Default Magento layered navigation generates long, parameter-based URLs (?color=red&size=medium&price=50-100). These cause issues such as:

• Duplicate content across multiple filter combinations
• Uncontrolled crawl paths that waste Google’s crawl budget
• Unfriendly URLs that lower CTR and reduce shareability
• Difficulty in setting consistent canonical tags

With ElasticSuite powering filters, these risks grow exponentially in large catalogs, making clean URL handling non-negotiable for SEO.

2. The Hyvä Advantage

Hyvä removes frontend bloat from Magento, ensuring faster rendering and better Core Web Vitals. But Hyvä doesn’t change how layered navigation URLs are generated - that’s where developers must apply dedicated SEO solutions. To fully realize Hyvä’s performance promise, faceted navigation must be paired with clean, optimized URLs.

3. Best Practices for Faceted Navigation SEO

Developers should enforce the following rules when configuring ElasticSuite and layered navigation:

• Canonical control: set canonical tags to category roots, not every filter combination
• Selective indexing: allow high-value filter pages (e.g., “red shoes”) but noindex deep combinations
• Sitemaps discipline: exclude filter-generated URLs from XML sitemaps
• Performance focus: avoid generating billions of indexable URLs that slow both search engines and servers

4. Introducing SEO: Pretty Filter URLs

qoliber’s SEO: Pretty Filter URLs is purpose-built for this problem. It automatically generates SEO-friendly, short, and indexable URLs for any filter combination, fully compatible with Hyvä and ElasticSuite.

• 8 pre-defined URL schemas to match your SEO strategy
• Clean, crawlable URLs without messy parameters
• Seamless integration with ElasticSuite’s layered navigation
• Performance-optimized, tested on catalogs with millions of SKUs
• Automatic canonicalization to prevent duplicates

5. Developer Workflow for Implementation

To integrate faceted navigation SEO safely:

• Install and configure SEO: Pretty Filter URLs
• Define URL schema rules (e.g., attribute slugs in path vs grouped parameters)
• Test canonical and robots meta on filtered pages
• Validate sitemap exclusion rules for non-canonical filters (check our SEO: Advanced Sitemaps)
• Run Lighthouse and crawl audits to confirm performance and crawlability

Conclusion

Faceted navigation is a double-edged sword: essential for UX, but dangerous for SEO if left unchecked. In Magento 2 projects using Hyvä and ElasticSuite, developers must ensure URLs remain clean, canonicalized, and crawl-efficient.

qoliber’s SEO: Pretty Filter URLs solves this challenge out of the box, giving agencies and merchants a scalable way to control filter URLs without sacrificing performance. Explore more in our Magento 2 extensions library to keep your Hyvä builds SEO-safe and performance-first.