Multiple product hierarchies (creation of refurbished products section) - best solution?
-
Hi all, I'm in discussion with a client who wishes to introduce a 'refurbished' products section to their website. This section will effectively replicate the structure of the 'brand new' products section. Unusually the key difference will be the fact that the 'refurbished' products section will feature significantly more products than the 'brand new' section, in the region of four times as many. As a guide the website currently stocks approximately 200 products across 8 core product areas. We have recommended that the two sections should be combined in order to prevent the creation of two separate product hierarchies. With 'brand new' / 'refurbished' products segmented via filter functionality. However the client is set on having two separate product hierarchies, i.e. a 'refurbished' section within a completely separate directory.
Just wanted to crowd source opinion, in additionally to gaining insight if anyone has experience of a similar request. What solution did you implement? My feeling is that there is a high likelihood over time of the 'refurbished' section growing in authority and starting to outrank the 'brand new' products section. Not to mention a key missed opportunity to group and build authority / content within one product hierarchy.
All thoughts and opinions much appreciated!
-
I'd worry mostly about it becoming a duplicate content nightmare. It would be better to have a choice to buy the brand new item or a refurbished one on a single product page. Think of how Amazon lets you select different versions of a books, movie, etc., different sellers, new/used, etc., all on one page.
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
-
Best Strategy for FAQ & Canonical?
I have an FAQ database setup on my site and there's about 30 questions in 6 categories so 5 questions per category which is a pretty good page size for one category. I'm trying to determine the best strategy for publishing them from both a user and SEO standpoint. From a user standpoint, I want to have one page per category. Dumping them into a page with all 30 questions is not user-friendly and some categories are very unrelated to others. I should note that Google did already index a page that does have all the questions on it, but I was just planning on changing that page to just have 6 links to each of the category pages so then I don't have to bother with 301 redirect or removing the pages in the site's Search Console. There's also an option to to link the questions for the entire FAQ or from the category list to one page with just that question and answer. So my thinking at this point is to as I said, just change the page that has all 30 questions to a list of the categories and link to category pages having the questions for that category and disable the individual question pages. Or would it be beneficial from an SEO page to have google index the individual question pages and link back to the category page and put a canonical tag on the category pages? In other words the question then becomes, index the category pages or index the individual question pages? The other issue is the answers for some of the questions are lengthy, multiple paragraphs, and the FAQ has the option to have a hide/unhide feature on the answers so you can easily see all the questions first then expand the answers on the ones you are interested in. However I thought I heard Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is by default hidden on page load. I guess this would then give a reason for going with the indexing of the individual question pages. But it seems to me, you can't put the canonical tag on the category pages and point it to the individual question page. And if you put the canonical tag on the individual question page linking it to the category page, then the individual page won't necessarily get indexed will it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem0 -
Image URLs - best practice
Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Best practice to prevent pages from being indexed?
Generally speaking, is it better to use robots.txt or rel=noindex to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
Where to learn how best to promote content?
So now I created some really good content (with help of Egol and Peter here on moz.com) and now I need to promote it. To get it in front of authoritative sites so they hopefully will write about and link to it. I erroneously figured it would be fairly easy. I contacted two writers of a high level industry blog/magazine that previously had mentioned us in press, sent them an email with an invitation to check it out and please let me know what they thought. NO response. They probably get deluged. Anyway, I can't afford to pay a marketing company to promote it. Where can I learn how to best do this myself? The content isn't going to help anyone if no one sees it.... Thanks for any leads! Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers1 -
Managing Multiple Websites via Add-On Domain
Hey SEOMOZ community, I've always been curious about whether or not hosting multiple websites through an 'add-on' domain has positive/negative effects on SEO for websites. Currently, I'm hosting 5 sites through an add-on domain at Hostgator.com. Is this a poor way to set-up my sites or is this OK?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith0 -
Best way to host multiple sites for maximum seo
We have over 100 websites we built for clients that we currently host on 1 shared godaddy hosting account. They each have a link to us but since they are all under one shared account, we feel that we are not maximizing the inbound link potential. I've looked into c class hosting but found that either the ip's were flagged as spam, or they shared nameservers which defeats the purpose. I've also been told that since the c class ip's a hosting company gives to you are all owned by them, that also defeats the purpose. Anyone have any solutions besides opening 130 accounts with different hosting companies? Also, will it make any difference changing existing sites onto different hosts now or are they already tainted?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopet0