Google Product Search Feed Specification Changes
This isn’t exactly interesting news, but it is necessary – Google are changing their product search feed specification and if you don’t adhere to the changes you could get your account suspended (which would be pretty bad, because Google Product Feeds provide a lot of targeted traffic). The news was announced on Friday on the Google Merchant Blog.
Basically you need to ensure certain attributes are included, if you would like to see a summary of the required attributes (new and old) you can do so here.
The way I see it is that Google is getting everyone to conform to its exact standards, and perhaps eventually it will create an ecommerce sites to rival Amazon – they already have everything in place, they just need to pull it all togeter – after all, it is called Google Product Search Beta.
3 Comments
DijitulDave - http://www.dijitul.co.uk
Not too difficult to implement. More time though, thanks Google!!
In regards to the online shop, I can see something being done later next year, they never stand still and they seem to have been improving their product search market for quite some time. It would be a pretty big project for them and my concern is just how much power Google will then have over even more online shop owners.
Jordan McClements - http://www.ppcni.com
At the very least they’ll start charging for it soon in some shape or form.
Still, It’s nice to be able to sell stuff totally free of charge (for now anyway).
Carps - http://www.trusteddealers.co.uk
It can actually be quite hard depending on the kinds of product. The unique product identifier for cars – the VIN (vehicle identification number) – is by no means easily accessible to most sellers as you have to get it from a third-party data source, which also has an appreciable cost overhead. I’m sure there’ll be lots of other product categories with similar problems. It’ll be a good move in the long run, and I dig the rationale but it’s another headache!