Google Product Feed Newbie Question

[94501]

Hi,

I don't know much of anything about Google Pruduct Feeds. Here is my starting point on thia:

1. Is this really free? We'd be doing it without Google checkout, just landing on our own pages with our own checkout.

2. Where do you upload the file?

3. What determines if you come up or not as a result? Any strategy or tactics involved?

4. We're the manufacturer of a product and late to the product feed game. The description that Google has used for our products is not ours or great. How do we change that product description that Google has for our products?

Thanks!

[seanmccauley]

1. Yes, it's really free, regardless of whether you use it with Google Checkout or not.

2. You can upload your product file here:
http://www.google.com/merchants/bulkuploads

you can find out more about the specification for the feed file for the US here,

http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=188494

different countries require slightly different specs.

3. Google merchant SEO is all about providing accurate data, giving your customers as much information as possible in your product feed file, and updating your feed as regularly as possible.

[94501]

Hey Sean,

That is super helpful. Do normal title and description length parameters apply, just like a title/description tag?

On competitive terms, what determines who Google chooses to rank?

As the manufacturer, how do we get Google to change it's description of our products?

Thanks!

[JerDoggMckoy]

I would optimize your product pages for Google, and you don't have to be worried about what Google is posting based off of your feeds.

I am not 100% sure on this, but I believe Google will sometimes pull the lowest priced and/or the most frequently updated product feeds. Otherwise they tend to group the product from 8-20 stores or whatever. Your product descriptions get updated when they get changed within your feed. It is best to have your feed get automatically pulled by Google every day, then Google will give you a boost in rankings because your information is among the freshest and most accurate.

These are just opinions based on experience however, I have no data to back it up really. Check out this qa post here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-tips-for-optimizing-your-google-product-feeds