New, Used, Refurbished Ecommerce Products
-
I'm in a situation where I am trying to improve an ecommerce site that sells about 10-15 products, and a few variations of each. My main headache is coming from the fact that we sell New, used, and refurbished products that are often overlapping. I'm not really sure if I am categorizing the products/structuring the site the best possible way.
Here is an example that shows the current structure of the site:
New Fruits
--> Bananas
----> Banana Model 1
----> Banana Model 2
--> Apples
----> Apple Model 1
----> Apple Model 2
--> Oranges
----> Orange Model 1
----> Orange Model 2Refurbished Fruits --> Bananas
----> Refurbished Banana
--> Apples
----> Refurbished Apple
--> Oranges
----> Refurbished OrangeThe business, however, specializes in the refurbished models because they make significantly more money for each one that is sold. Because of this, it's way more important to get the refurbished models ranking up for the terms.
I've been struggling to get good results from my SEO efforts and I think that this strange site structure could be holding me back.
Would it make sense for me to use canonical on the "New Fruits" pages, pointing toward the "Refurbished Fruits" pages?
Should I be trying to build links to the category pages or the actual product pages. IE: To "Refurbished Fruits --> Bananas" rather than "Refurbished Fruits --> Bananas --> Refurbished Banana?"
-
Yeah... I think that is the best approach as people search for the fruit first and fore-most then would probably decide on the refurbished or not.
-
So you think I should combine the New and Refurbished categories and just organize them by Fruits? I think that would be pretty useful. It would lessen the amount of duplicate content that I'm getting while also allowing me to send links to the category page that would help both New and Refurbished get found.
-
I would focus on the fruit. I'd have fruit categories and put the refurbished on the top of that structure. People are searching for the fruit first and foremost and not "refurbished" in general. I would not canonical back the new product URLs to the refurbished ones. Keep them pure. However to push the refurbished fruit you could add links and advertising on the new fruit back to the refurbished fruit pages.
I would think you would want to link build back to the category unless the content is real specific to a model. I am thinking the category will be more permanent and you wouldn't want a link back to a product that is sold out or no longer available.
Hope this helps - good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Discontinued products on ecommerce store
Hi, I have a high number of very-low/zero traffic and zero backlinked product pages that have been discontinued (and wont come back). For these pages we automatically remove them from our website indexes and also removed internal links and then essentially kept the product pages and their urls intact but just added a note saying "no longer available, how about these..." with alternate similar product options. This seems to be the general consensus online for discontinued product pages that have little value. The questions is do I either 404 or noindex these now discontinued pages? What are the pros or cons? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coma990 -
Many New Urls at once
Hi, I have about 5,000 new URLs to publish. For SEO/Google - Should I publish them gradually, or all at once is fine? *By the way - all these URLs were already indexed in the past, but then redirected. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Should I use a rel=canonical to the home page
Hi guys, I have a site where the homepage is ranking for the term 'industrial flooring' around position 30 and the actual level 2 industrial flooring page is ranking well below at around position 60. I'm happy for the homepage to rank for this term and would like to see it improve, so here are my questions: 1: Is the existence of the level 2 page preventing the homepage from ranking higher due to keyword cannibalization etc.? 2: Would the use of the rel=canonical tag pointing from the level 2 page to the home page have a positive or negative impact on the homepage's rankings for 'industrial flooring'? 3: Is there anything else I'm missing? Greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
Experience of moving to a new domain
Hi all just wondering if anyone has ever had any experience / tips / advice. moving from domain name a to b is well published all over the web and the practice is often discussed on here. but my question is has anyone ever done moving the domain from a to b and then after x time move back to domain a. i can't find any examples, notes anywhere on Google. thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
New Site Structure and 301s
We're moving towards a new site with new site structure. The old site has numerous backlinks to past events that won't be published on the new site. The new site will have about 60 future events that are currently active on the old site as well. I was wondering the best way to move forward with the 301 redirect plan. I was considering redirecting the old site structure to an "archive.ourdomain.co.uk" subdomain and redirecting the 60 or so active events to their equivalents on the new site. Would this be a sensible plan? Also for the active events, is there any difference between: _redirecting the old page to the archive page and then forwarding to the equivalent on the new page _ and redirecting the old page directly to the new page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chanm790 -
What is the best way to optimize/setup a teaser "coming soon" page for a new product launch?
Within the context of a physical product launch what are some ideas around creating a /coming-soon page that "teases" the launch. Ideally I'd like to optimize a page around the product, but the client wants to try build consumer anticipation without giving too many details away. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSI0 -
Launching a new site with old, new and updated content: What’s best practice?
Hi all, We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content. We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together. Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content? Cheers, Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0