Ecommerce New & Refurbished with multiple versions of refurbished

[intown]

I am working with a website that sells new and multiple grades of refurbished power tools

• New
• Refurbished Grade A (top quality refurbished)
• Refurbished Grade C (had a few more scuffs but in perfect working order)
• Refurbished Grade D (no warranty / as is conditions, typically for parts)

How would you create the Products and URL structure?

Since they are all technically different products they have their own sku in magento.

Would you combine them into one URL with different product options? or would you give each product version its own url (New, Grade A, Grade C, Grade D)

Thanks! -- Steven

[intown]

Thanks so much for your time, information & reply.

I had not thought about schema having a OfferItemCondition option.  I think that could help differentiate the pages.

These are all fairly popular tools, stuff you can buy at home depot with prices between $50 & $350.

Here is the site if I can post a link  https://bigskytool.com/hitachi-reconditioned-tools.html

As much as separate URLs will be more to manage I think it may be best.

• New vs Refurbished are two definitely different products.
• When we run a sale on a particular Grade, I need a way to link directly to that grade
• When we run adwords and google merchant center, we need a way to filter our just refurbished or just new.

Here is what I am thinking as of now

New - Unique  URL with self referencing canonical URL.
Schema of OfferItemCondition of New

Grade A - Unique URL with self referencing canonical URL
Schema of OfferItemCondition of Refurbished

Grace C - Unique URL with canonical URL pointing to Grade A
Schema of OfferItemCondition of Refurbished

Grace D - Unique URL with canonical URL pointing to Grade A
Schema of OfferItemCondition of Refurbished

This would make the distinction between New and Refurbished Products

Then in Refurbished products there will be duplicate content but hopefully the canonical URLS should help.

Ideally Google would rank the New Page for when someone searches for the product and Google would rank the "Grade A" product page when they search for the Refurbished version.

I will essentially have 4 pages with very similar content, hopefully the canonical URLs and Item OfferCondition will help the search engines know, which (two) versions of the page I think is important.

I will also have prominent links that show the different grades with the different prices in the product description to help with human usability.

Any flaws with this logic? or better approaches?

Amazon sort of gets into this with books, there is one book but it can come in multiple formats Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, Audible, AudioCD

Thanks! -- Steven

[danatanseo]

Hi Steve,

This is a great question. I think it depends entirely on how much search volume there is surrounding the other variants for "refurbished" parts. If there's a reasonable amount, I'd recommend giving them their own URLs. I know this is harder because if they are substantively similar, producing unique content could be more difficult. I believe you can use schema.org markup to indicate "condition" [http://schema.org/OfferItemCondition] - This would help search engines understand that these items are unique from each other in important ways.

As long as it was clear to both humans and search engines that these power tools are uniquely different from each other in some way, I'd opt for the separate URLs and optimize them for long-tail terms.

If the only difference were color, say a power tool came in red or black, then maybe I would consider making these attributes that didn't necessarily influence the URL. Again there would be the caveat of search volume. If there was significant search volume for different colors, than having separate URLs and schema markup for each would be the way to go.

This is a similar type of question eCommerce site merchandisers (and SEOs!) ask themselves when strategizing how to handle faceted navigation. What combinations of facets warrant their own URLs and which ones do not? I would let search demand guide your answer.