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There are 6 fields you place in your tab delimited file, if some of you want to get a head start...
1. product_URL
2. name (< 80 characters)
3. description (<5K bytes)
4. price
5. image_URL
6. category (you can specify one category)
7. offer_id (internal product code for you)
Other optional fields that you can put in (that they may use in the future) include shipping cost, instock, color, size, currency.... so I guess they will expand on the features like shipping prices, etc. eventually.
No limit on the size of the file or how many items/pages was specified. I'm going to make a list right now and see how fast this stuff gets in! :)
[edited by: born2drv at 1:07 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2002]
No mention of HTML. I am assuming no.
BTW, Froogle name is great and could be a value add although I have not spent enough time to see what it offers different than a price comparision shop like mysimon, dealtime on the web!.
Oh No! How can you optimize these pages without extra promotional text, especially when you have the cheapest low cost discount sofware prices online? And I guess link popularity is out the window on these data feed records, so how can you get these pages to rise in the ranks by trading links all over the Web?
How in the world can you get your pages in front of the surfers if you can't optimize them for ranking in Froogle?
How in the world can you get your pages in front of the surfers if you can't optimize them for ranking in Froogle
! # 1 AAA Apples and Pears Shop
;)
Just kidding...
I'm still being blanked after the first auto-response. If I hear nothing by tomorrow I'll try again....
Maybe I should hide this and submit a US number (either a bogus one or one of my contacts over there). That would pretty much make it look US all round.
The other possibility if they are rejecting it because of the payment mechanism. I use ShareIT in Germany. I could easily shift to PayPal if it's that.
Any suggestions GG? Is the US criteria: site location or payment mechanism location or the owners location?
I'm only US based, and I still haven't gotten anything since the first email. I'm sure it will take a little while..
Froogle doesn't list Affiliate marketing sites. But products with affiliate links have got through and are listed on Froogle, the google bot must have crawled the pages and somehow decided they were legit. This may get corrected as the product is enhanced, but for now they are getting through.
When these are spotted, or very likely reported for being there, how will google remove them.
Given that the same bot is feeding froogle and google web results, the method to remove these pages from froogle may well be be to remove them from google althogether. It may be counted as Spam, even though they weren't submitted to Froogle.
Is this likely to be the case, should we Affiliates worry that out site may get dropped from google altogether because one or two product pages with Affliate links have become listed on froogle, and then may get reported.
Free press releases are one way of capitalizing on an R&D flub. The techies take the blame and get fired for a failed program. The marketing guys get promoted for getting the company's name all over the media.
1. Regionalisation
GoogleGuy - I'm sure you didn't mean it to sound like this, but when you use phrases such as "we're always looking for new ways to organize the world's information" (msg#:20) and "Froogle ... shows all the places that we know of on the web" (msg#:45) in the context of a service that only lists US-based sites, well it could be interpreted that Google thinks 'the world' = the US.
For any European-based etailer that trades with US-based customers, these comments are not helpful. I have a client here in the west of Ireland that sells traditional Irish widgets to US-based customers. These widgets are local, ethnic products and this regional authenticity is a big selling point. Out of the top 20 sites returned for a search on this product on google.com, only one (a yahoo store) appears in the top 20 on froogle.com. All the top sites for this product are based in Ireland or Scotland, yet Froogle will deny searchers the benefit of finding these retailers. I know I'm talking about a specific niche product, but its not the only one and if you add up all these regional niche items that are excluded from Froogle because of its US-bias, its a considerable number. One of the beauties of the Web is that it allows local producers around the world to sell directly to individual customers around the world. As it currently stands Froogle will put a stop to this.
There have been plenty of threads here about Google's problems with identifying regional sites:
Why not appearing in Google's UK pages? [webmasterworld.com]
UK hosted site not appearing on Google.co.uk [webmasterworld.com]
Listed in [Google] .co.uk, but not in .com? [webmasterworld.com]
Non-US hosting: Does it hurt your rankings in Google.com? [webmasterworld.com]
I wonder if it is significant that you have never participated in these threads? Certainly these problems with IP-based ranking on Google do not give any confidence that regional Froogles will deliver an improved service to global shoppers on the Web.
2. Legal Issues
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but surely there are legal implications regarding the publishing of price information by a third party (in this case, by Froogle). I'm not talking about price info from the data feeds (this is the only safe way to go), but surely publishing price information based on an unsolicited crawl by a spider of a web site will have huge legal risks if it returns inaccurate or misleading information? I know its still in beta mode, but if Froogle is returning a book's ISBN number as its price, or displaying a price for a multiple order when users think it is an individual price, well its a lawsuit waiting to happen. In traditional media, if a newspaper/magazine/radio/TV station wanted to publish price information for a third-party product, a journalist would check with the manufacturer and/or distributor. All it takes is one mistake and one sharp lawyer and the whole thing could end in tears. So surely data feeds can be the only way to go? In which case, I really hope that they are as easy to implement as some of the posts here suggest.
If one retailer sells a packet of 50 widgets for $20, and another sells in packets of 100 widgets to a packet at $35. Which would google deem to be the best bargain and therefore rank highest, or would it just list 50 widgets for $20 as it's the lowest price. And the number in a packet isn't always displayed next to the price. In which case froogle isn't offerng a very good price comparison. I notice the results in froogle do not list the best prices first, maybe the word comparison is wrong, and it's really just a list of prices for visitors to scroll through. Whatever, to be a proper comparison site will take more than just crawling a site and listing what is found.
Also, how does froogle get around a retailer showing widgets at $10. A bargain as widgets usually cost $100. But on the retailers site it says "when purchased with the deluxe widget holder". Froogle could be very open to abuse such as this, in fact I think this sort of thing would become as widespread as search engine spamming used to be. Once Froogle is up and running, I expect the results to quickly become worthless as some retailers applied every trick to make their prices look low. List the price of the optional batteries first, the depost first if the product can bought over several months, list the installment amount if it can be purchased over a period. Of course, then the retailers playing by the book would be penalised, just like spam of old.
And yes, if I have a uk based site which is selling to the US, but as it's hosted in the Uk is exempt from froogle, wouldn't that come under "unfair competition" or some such, or would that only apply if google was making a profit from the listings. Or are google assuming US sites only sell to US customers, UK sites only sell to UK customers.
Seems to be a real can of worms to me.
If you have prices in US dollars, and you ship to the USA, it should not matter, but Fruggle has ignored my request for uploading information.
I think this Frogle thing will take off, and I don't want my competitors to get an edge on me, because Froogle is discrimatory due to Geographic Profiling.
Would someone post the data format and uploading instructions. This way it will level the playing field for everybody that has a website with American Pricing regardless of geographic location.
Its the end of the world as we know it.
...and I feel fine. ;)
Now Google has said it does NOT hand manipulate SERP’s - kinda hard to believe with the evidence in your face.
I guess its OK for Google to hand manipulate search results, I mean its there search engine and they can do whatever they want (as so many of you are fond of saying) but then why tell everyone you don’t hand manipulate SERP’s?
Of course it could have just been a happenstance, but I don’t buy it.
Please do a site search on everflux to learn more about it.
Yes the site just appears with a fresh date, one day after it goes live - no hand manipulation here - give me a break...
This means it came up here first! Thanks again feeder, you scooped hem all! ;)
Went to #1 because who else is competing for the word "Froogle"? Take any obscure word nobody has heard of and build a page about it with a few incoming links and it will pop at the top every
time.
Perfectly normal for any new domain (or sub domains) during the everflux process. Always been like that for me.
Please do a site search on everflux to learn more about it. ;)
