Google Base (formerly Froogle & Google Product Search) UK Comparison Site Overview

Google Base Merchant Account Creation Signup

Google Base
Froogle
Google Product Search

www.google.com/products

not published

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Privately Owned

Mountain View, California, USA

all

not really necessary

This is a free service

none

Google Base is the single place that everyone should advertise first. It's free and all it needs is a decent product feed. The feed specs are discussed below. The major benefit of using Google Base, and also spending a long time optimising your listings, is that they display the top 3 results for product searches on the first page of the Google results, often above the organic listings.

Google Base feeds can often be very frustrating to deal with. Often you will see that the feed has been disapproved for no apparent reason. Sadly as this is a free service there is very little support from them to help you get the problems ironed out. Once a feed has successfully been processed you will often see your products to start appearing within 24 hours.

So what do they need in a feed?

Required Attributes -

• condition

  The condition of the product. Learn more

  Format: Text. Supported values are: new, used, and refurbished.

  Tab-delimited example: refurbished

  XML example: <g:condition>refurbished</g:condition>

• description

  Text describing the item. Do not include promotional or boilerplate text, such as "Free shipping!" or "Click here now!" We search over this text when matching user queries to your item. Please make sure you include the same item description available on your website in the description field in your data feed.

  Format: Text, up to a maximum length of 10,000 characters. Ideally, greater than 15 characters and three words.

  Tab-delimited example: The Veracruz Oval Table and accompanying Patio chairs are cast from aluminum, welded and constructed with longevity in mind. During the finishing process, each piece is sanded, brushed, and painted by hand.

  XML example: <description>The Veracruz Oval Table and accompanying Patio chairs are cast from aluminum, welded and constructed with longevity in mind. During the finishing process, each piece is sanded, brushed, and painted by hand.</description>

• id

  A unique alphanumeric identifier for the item - e.g., your internal ID code. IMPORTANT: Once you submit an item with a unique id, this identifier must not change when you send in a new data feed. Each item must retain the same id in subsequent feeds.

  Format: Text.

  Tab-delimited example: 01flx

  XML example: <g:id>01flx</g:id>

• link

  The URL of the web page associated with the item. This should not forward to another URL; it must point directly to the target page. The domain name may not be an IP address.

  Format: URL. (Must include the http:// portion.)

  Tab-delimited example: http://www.example.co.uk/asp/sp.asp?cat=12&id=1030

  XML example: <link>http://www.example.co.uk/asp/sp.asp?cat=12&amp;id=1030</link>

• price

  The price for the item. The price must be inclusive of any value added tax (VAT) charged upon checkout.

  Format: Number.

  Tab-delimited example: 25.00

  XML example: <g:price>25.00</g:price>

• title

  The name or title of the item.

  Format: Text. Suggested maximum length of 70 characters.

  Tab-delimited example: Patio set

  XML example: <title>Patio set</title>

These are the bare essential requirements to get a feed up on Google Base. In some areas this is all you need, however in the main categories such as electronics and appliances you will of course need more information to make you 'rank higher' or give your products more 'relevancy'. With increasing competition on Google now it is making it even harder to get your listings further up the results. Another factor to bare in mind is that major retailers get a higher ranking score due to their prominence in e-commerce (similar to the adwords algorithm). This then is coupled with their click popularity as a major retailer. The result is that you will often only see the major retailers at the top of the listings for anything but the most niche and specific searches.

Thankfully Google have started to compact products down (gathering all identical products together and forming a price comparison of them on a single page). In electronics and computing you can now compare prices on products, giving the small man the chance to get more traffic as often niche retailers get better prices on products giving them top positions.

So how do you get better rankings on Google and also get onto the first page?

Feed Optimisation -
Feed optimisation is in many respects identical to site optimisation, where using keywords that describe the product are essential. It is the keyword density, as with SEO that the real benefits are to be made. Google puts a high relevancy on the first few words of your description. Ensure this part is keyword rich and is relevant to your product. You have up to 70 characters for each title so ensure that you include as many keywords as possible (above this you are wasting your time as the words will not be shown). Optimised titles are the difference between page 2 and page 6 for home and garden clothing items. Titles that have the same content as the description are marked down for relevancy so be sure to make them different.

Images -
If you don't have images in your feed you will fall way down the listings for each product. Make sure every product has an image.

Additional non-required fields -

EAN
EAN's are becoming a key feature in comparing identical products. EAN numbers historically have not had that much importance, however this is starting to change. If you have the EAN of your products, add this as an extra column.

Shipping (not used yet, but worth adding)
Google uses the US way of advertising the shipping cost, where there are 4 elements all seperated by colons. e.g. - UK:::4.99
There is no need to fill the middle parts as most UK merchants don't have state and distance shipping rules.

Size
The size of clothing and other products is again only going to increase your relevancy to Google.

The whole breakdown of the variables you can supply to Google is available here

Overall the way to optimise your Google feeds is to give them as much information as possible as well being clever in the data you are giving them. It's not rocket science, but getting the feed content right can be time consuming. If you are having trouble with your feeds please get in touch and we'll be able to help you out.