This Sorting Function Can Double Your SEO Sales!

Sorting and Change View Features in Web Shops

Have you ever wondered how many visitors use the sorting and change view features in web shop categories and what their impact on SEO is? Well, maybe. But you should definitely take care of them because handling them in the right way can improve the overall SEO performance of a web shop significantly. That's why I will show you in this deep dive three things you should know about the sorting and change view features and how to fix them in order to improve your SEO to rank better in Google organic rankings, Google's AI overview and LLMs like Chat GPT.

Usage Statistics

How often did you personally use the sorting and change view features in an online store? Exactly! Rarely, barely, or even never. But we shouldn't assume our potential customers behave like we do. Therefore, we should take a look at some reliable usage statistics or even better measure it in our online store. Because nobody cared so much about them, there are no publicly available reliable usage statistics. But from my 23 years of experience, I can vouch for the following two things:

A) in 99% of online stores, the view change toggle is never clicked. And if somebody clicks on it, the possibility that it was an accident is huge, especially on mobile devices. You can try and measure it for your online store by using tools like Mouseflow or Hotjar and analyze the click heatmaps. The only exception are online stores which have the default view set up wrong. So if you're selling something where the technical features aren't important like fashion, you should use the grid view. And if your web shop relies on technical features, then you probably should use the list view like in this example. But for most shops, the grid view is the right choice.

And B), the second thing we can be sure about is that the sorting function is more often used than changing the view from grid to list or vice versa. But still only in rare cases. Strictly speaking, just in one case - when the default sorting is not helpful. Most users either search for the bestselling products in a category or the cheapest ones depending on what you're selling. The default sorting should be one of those two. But if the cheapest product is so often sought for, then it is automatically a best-selling product. So making your default sorting in categories by best-selling products is the best choice and also has many SEO benefits because the products generating the most revenue are given the most link juice and therefore rank better if the default sorting is by best-selling products. Makes sense, doesn't it?

The Problem of Unnecessary URLs

The big problem about those two features almost nobody uses is that they are generating ugly and unnecessary parameter URLs like these. We don't want those URLs to be found by Google and especially not be indexed because that can create a duplicate version of your category page and create a duplicate content issue. They also eat up your indexing and crawler budgets and by doing that weaken your category and product pages. So, what is the solution?

The Solution

Obviously, the best solution would be to set the default sorting to bestselling and remove the sorting and view change features completely. Why hold on to them if nobody's using them and they hurt your Google rankings? But so many online stores have a bad feeling about removing them and still keep them. It's a mystery to me what the arguments for such behavior are. But if that is the case for your online store too, then the second best solution would be to keep them but disable the URL generation for them. So instead of generating those weird URLs when clicking on them, the URL shouldn't change. Usually that is done by implementing those features with JavaScript behavior for non-JavaScript shop content management systems. In case your shop is based on a JavaScript framework, it is much easier to disallow URL generation for them. But what if your developers say that this isn't possible or it would take too long to implement it? Well, the third best solution then would be to set the meta robots tag of those ugly sorting and view URLs to noindex,nofollow and let the canonical tag point to the category page. That shouldn't be a big hassle for any developer. If you're using WooCommerce, you can do that by using our SEO Link Juice Plugin. You will find link in the description to it. Please don't forget, no matter which of those solutions you choose, to check if any internal links are pointing to those URLs and remove them. You can use tools like Screaming Frog or even better, Jet Octopus to find those internal links. Links to them are also in the description. And you should also check if those URLs didn't end up in your sitemaps by mistake. If they did, remove them from there, too. After you have implemented the solution, wait for the next big crawl by a Googlebot, and you'll see the impact. In midsize online stores, that happens on average every two weeks. If you want another impactful quick SEO fix, watch this video next.