Posted on July 11, 2011 by John Rampton in Cool Tools, local marketing resources, News
We work a lot with Google Merchant Center for many of our clients. Today, Google is updating its requirements for merchants in a number of countries. Google Merchant Center will be targeting the United States, France, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany to start off with. All of our clients are 100% compliant and always have been. This should help out all the legit people out there because the no so legit people will be take out.
In the U.S., Google is changed its Google Product Search Feed to be more useful for all online shoppers and fight against the growing number of people trying to rip you off. For background, online retailers create a data feed for their content they would like to be indexed by Google Product search.
Google Posted this in their update:
- Availability: We’d 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: We 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: We’re making [image link] required and we 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 colors or sizes, we ask you to include information like [size] and [color] in your product feed. In addition, we require you to provide [gender] and [age group].
- Data Freshness: We will continue to regularly check feeds for accuracy of pricing, availability, and general product information, and take action against accounts that violate our standards.
Google said that starting September 22, 2011, Google will be ‘taking action’ against accounts with feeds. I think this is a great move in the right direction.
