NOTE: Froogle is not called Google Product Search

Leveling the Playing Field

Do you use Froogle to buy or sell products? Click EasyEdit to add your tips and tricks to the list below.

Froogle is the ultimate shopping catalog, combining everything for sale on the internet in one place.

Type in a product and Froogle will display all the results with a photo of the product and a price. Then, sort by relevance or price. Find the lowest price on golf clubs on the net, or the most pricey diamond ring.

Still miss your old, trusty catalogs? Google Catalogs lets you search a mountain of U.S. mail-order product catalogs.

But Froogle isn’t just for frugal shoppers—it’s for sellers, too. Google is trying to take on sites like eBay that offer easy-to-use services for sellers of the products that inventory the site. If you are setting up an online business that trades in merchandise, Google has made it easy to push that information into Froogle, instead of waiting around for Google to pull it into its index.

Tips for setting yourself up as a Froogle seller:

Setting up a product feed

All you need to do is feed a spreadsheet or text file containing your product information to Google, and the engine will do the rest. You can update your product feed as often as you like, up to once a day. Froogle offers two separate product feeds, one for basic retailers, and an advanced option if you are dealing in high volume (e.g. thousands of video or book titles).

• Basic product feed instructions

• Advanced product feed instructions

Seller guidelines

Like Google’s search engine, Froogle doesn’t play around with people it thinks are cheating the system. Screw up once, and you are out the door. Here are a few rules you must play by as a Google seller:

• Direct U.S. online sales only are acceptable.
• Affiliate sites are not acceptable.
• Direct shipping to the customer is required.
• Sales must be in U.S. dollars only.
• The dollar sign ($) must appear once only per page.
• Specify the product name and the price together.

Product feed optimization

Once you’re started with Froogle, your next goal is to increase your page rank on the search results of Froogle. You want your product on top to maximize the number of click-throughs you will get from buyers. For instance:

• Include all relevant product information in your data feed, like the product’s brand name or ISBN. Keep in mind that the information in your data feed must match the information on your product web page. Your product feed is only for Google, not for the users and buyers.

• Keep your descriptions as informative but brief as possible. Forty to sixty words is the ideal for generating a good keyword relevancy factor.

• Write product names that use general terms: the brand name, model, manufacturer, and product type. Think about how potential buyers and Google users will search for your products when labeling them in your product feed file.

• Visit the Froogle Merchant Center to find answers to product feed problems.

Image optimization

The most important part of your product information is the companion image file. A good, relevant image will increase your click-throughs and therefore your chances of selling the items. Here are some important tips:

• First and foremost, you need to make your image folders spiderable. Google’s spiders are digging through billions of web pages all the time. Some have decided they don’t like this, and have put robots.txt files into their image folders to prevent spidering. Keeping Froogle from capturing your images only hurts your business and reduces your click-throughs.

• Name your image files with short, relevant names that identify your product. Establish a naming convention so that all your products follow the same model, like gonewiththewind.gif or golfclubs.gif.

• Froogle does not accept images 90x90 pixels or smaller. If you don’t have a bigger one, then don’t send it. Send Google your full-sized image from your website in your product feed and Froogle will resize it for you. Now that’s service!

Website optimization

While Froogle works with your product feed, like the rest of Google, Froogle is also constantly searching your Web site for information, even cross-referencing that information with your product feed, which is why your primary website and product feed need to be as identical as possible. Tweaking your site could improve your Froogle results and product ranking within Froogle. For instance:

• Your web page should be laid out in HTML. Keeping your product information within Java or Flash will make it difficult for Google spiders to find it.

• If you are using tables on your site, put your product image, title, description and price into one cell or as few cells as possible.

• Include your “add to cart” button (or other purchase indicator) within the same table as your price and product image.

• The “$” sign (dollar sign) should appear and may be of greater value if it is bold and set in a larger font size.

• Keep the title and description listed on your product web page identical to the one listed in your Froogle data feed.

• Add an uninterrupted 25–28 word sentence for your description that includes your keyword and is meaningful to readers.

• Place the product description directly underneath the product title and, if possible, within the same cell as the title, price, and image.

See also:

• Fun With Google
• Gmail
• Google Book Search
• Google Calendar
• Google Groups

• Google Maps
• Google News
• Google Search Tips
• Google Zeitgeist
• Image Search
• Your Website and Google
• GBuy