3.7.7. Facet navigation link-masking

Owned by Adnan Krzavic
Last updated: Apr 14, 2022 by Duy Pham
2 min read

With MageSuite’s Link-Masking you are able to hide certain links for search engine machines. In the case of filtering, there is a huge amount of filter combinations possible which might be crawled and indexed by search engines, although being not fully relevant. Link-Masking allows to control which filter values should be followed and crawled by search engines. This allows to use the search engines crawling budget more efficiently, which in turn improves the SEO performance. Additionally link- masking allows to change the URL structure by removing parameters from the URL. See the example below.

 

URL Example with filtering options: size “M”, color “green” and climate condition “all-weather”

Figure 147 URL without Link-Masking

 

 

 

Same filtering options with enabled link-masking.

Figure 148 URL with Link-Masking

 

In order to configure your Link-Masking options access STORES / SETTINGS / CONFIGURATION and then collapse MAGESUITE and navigate to SEO. Expand Link masking to show configuration options.

 

Figure 149 Link-Masking configurations (admin panel)

 

Following options can be enabled:

 

  • IS ENABLED: Set this option to “YES” if you want to allow that filter links will be masked.

  • DEFAULT MASKING STATE: Set this option to “IS MASKED” if you wish to mask all filter links by default.

  • ONLY ONE FILTER DEMASKED: Set this option to “YES” if you wish to de-mask only the first filter option.

  • HIDE FILTER NAMES IN URL: Set this option to “YES” if you wish to only display filter values in the URL, instead of the filter name (e.g. “domain.com/category?color=blue&size=XS" will be changed to "domain.com/category/blue/XS").

  • OPTION SEPERATOR: This option determines the separator that will be used in the URL.

When the changes have been made click “SAVE CONFIG” on the upper part on the right-hand side.

 

Additionally you can control filters to be masked on category level. Access CATALOG / INVENTORY / CATEGORIES and select a category from the category tree. Open the section SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION where you can find the area SEO LINK MASKING. Here you can enable or disable link masking per filter.

Figure 150 Link-masking per filter on category level (admin panel)

 

 

When the changes are done, click “SAVE” in the upper section on the right-hand side.