If you have a product feed to Google Product Search then you need to make sure you comply with the changes coming into effect on Thursday 22nd September.
Google will gradually begin enforcing the new requirements by removing items from Google Product Search that do not meet the new requirements and, in some cases, suspending accounts that do not comply. The main changes are:
- Availability: Google wouldd like a user to be able to find your products even when they are out of stock. For this reason, the [availability] status of all your items will be required.
- Google Product Category: They have added a new required high-level attribute called [google product category] that contains the category of the item in Google’s taxonomy (currently only required for a select number of categories). This is in addition to the current [product type] attribute.
- Images: Google are making [image link] required and they encourage you to submit up to 10 additional product images through [additional image link]. This way, you can improve the visual representation of your products.
- Apparel: In order to create a better experience for product variants such as dresses or shoes that are available in multiple colours or sizes, they ask you to include information like [size] and [colour] in your product feed. In addition, we require you to provide [gender] and [age group].
- Data Freshness: Google will continue to regularly check feeds for accuracy of pricing, availability, and general product information, and take action against accounts that violate their standards.
If you’re unsure if your feeds comply with Google’s requirements then they do provide a Test Data Feed option. This allows you to upload your feed to Google Merchant Center without making these items available in the Product Search results in order to check and fix feed errors.
20 Responses
Nice reminder Chris. Cheers.
PITA but done, the product categories were a pain though. Couldn’t decide where Google would put a pouffe, did it in the end though. Another steep learning curve 🙂
Great reminder Chris, thanks for posting. Just an FYI there is a 7 day warning period for merchants that don’t update their feed and after that a 7 day suspension period, followed by a 28 day suspension period if the feed is still not updated.
Definitely something to be on top of.
Adding all variations is a huge PITA for apparel merchants but there are ways to extract variation data from ecommerce websites if it’s not already explicitly in their database.
EKM have updated there product feeds to include this additional information and I think eBay have done the same by introducing the EAN numbers in there cataloge so if these are accepting your data feeds you should be alright.
Does anyone upload a data feed to Shopmania? If you do you can get a free Facebook shop that sends traffic to your website. To find out more follow this link to the Tamebay Forum where there is a post all about it.
https://tamebaynew.wpengine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4829
This is nightmare for us, what we sell dont have EAN’s and according to google the brand and part number are both not valid, they 100% are, so in 2 days i expect our website to grind to a halt.
I know a lot compain about getting hold of ebay and paypal you should try google, makes paypal and ebay look like communication champions! 🙁
Hi Whirly – we sell alloy wheel fastenings, nuts bolts locating rings etc, they come from our supplier in boxes of 500 + we sell them in specific qty per fitment, 20 for 5 stud etc. We have used the suppliers part numbers and brand and both are showing as invalid 🙁
None taken Warren, just having a laugh.
Re the shopping stats, from what I gather you just need to modify your feed generator script and add a campaign tracking code at the end of a product link. bound to be more info on google if you do a search.
Out of curiosity has google got a link where they have a list of products and the product categories that they would like to have the products placed under? Google seem to use a completely different way of categorising products to eBay.
@simon
You probably need to be logged in to google to see this link, might help you.
https://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160161
Go to section 3.
Readers may find this free ebook on the upcoming Google Shopping changes and how to beat them useful:
https://blog.cpcstrategy.com/2011/09/new-google-product-feed-changes-go-live-tomorrow-922/
thanks for posting. Just an FYI there is a 7 day warning period for merchants that don’t update their feed and after that a 7 day suspension period, followed by a 28 day suspension period if the feed is still not updated. Are you using other software that can show traffic from Google Shopping and other detailed results.?
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