New, Used, Refurbished Ecommerce Products

[heroiceric]

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 2

Refurbished Fruits --> Bananas
  ----> Refurbished Banana
--> Apples
  ----> Refurbished Apple
--> Oranges 
  ----> Refurbished Orange

The 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?"

[STPseo]

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.

[heroiceric]

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.

[STPseo]

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!