Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce New & Refurbished with multiple versions of refurbished
-
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
-
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 NewGrade A - Unique URL with self referencing canonical URL
Schema of OfferItemCondition of RefurbishedGrace C - Unique URL with canonical URL pointing to Grade A
Schema of OfferItemCondition of RefurbishedGrace D - Unique URL with canonical URL pointing to Grade A
Schema of OfferItemCondition of RefurbishedThis 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
-
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.
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
-
Event Schema for Multiple Occurrences
I am wondering the best way to mark up an event page with multiple occurrences. For example, we have an event that happens over the course of 4 sequential weekends:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Your_Workshop
9/28-9/29
10/5-10/6
10/12-10/13
10/19-10/20 Our website allows us to enter multiple occurrences that results in a single event listing page which outputs all dates (to eliminate duplicate content, titles, metas, etc.) but allows each occurrence to output individually on our events calendar in the respective individual date. Each time the event is shown, it links to the same listing page. I am wondering if we can add event schema on a single listing multiple times to cover each occurrence. In the above example, we would have 4 schemas on the listing page for each date range/weekend. In our current schema, we end up with a start and end date identified as 9/28-10/20 but it is not clear that the event is just happening on the weekends with gaps in between. Any suggestions are welcome however, we are really trying to NOT list each as an individual event on the website both for the duplicate content issue and the extra burden on our client that lists events for a very large geographic area.0 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Multiple Landing Pages and Backlinks
I have a client that does website contract work for about 50 governmental county websites. The client has the ability to add a link back in the footer of each of these websites. I am wanting my client to get backlink juice for a different key phrase from each of the 50 agencies (basically just my keyphrase with the different county name in it). I also want a different landing page to rank for each term. The 50 different landing pages would be a bit like location pages for local search. Each one targets a different county. However, I do not have a lot of unique content for each page. Basically each page would follow the same format (but reference a different county name, and 10 different links from each county website). Is this a good SEO back link strategy? Do I need more unique content for each landing page in order to prevent duplicate content flags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shauna70840 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Redirecting to a new domain... a second time
Hi all, I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this: Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we... Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to... third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL. My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right? The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3) Thanks for any insights on this! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC1 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
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 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0