Feeding Data

I recently got the info on how (formating and upload) to feed to froogle and it looks like even if froogle spiders and indexes you that way, you can have more of an impact if you submit your own feed.

It looks like you will have more control over how people will find you (read: better keyword optimization) when you do the feed yourself. Because you can specifially specify the Title of the product, the description, catagories, image displayed, to meet the keywords you are targeting for that particular product.

And now froogle doesn't index all 50 or so of our products, this will make sure they do. Plus froogle is guessing on what the description is because it has to take some text as the description and that might not always be the best keyword rich description.

So I haven't actually done the data feed, but it looks like it will greatly improve your exposure if you do it rather than let froogle crawl your site and guess at it all.

- sean

 

Sounds interesting. From my view it seems like it is already easy.

In my case we only carry like 50 products, so creating an excel spreadsheet with 50 products and 5 cells per each product isn't hard. Then exporting that to a tabulated text file takes seconds and uploading that file also only takes seconds, so I don't see right away where your tool would come it.

I guess if you carry something like 300 products and you have them all entered into a database (access, or whatever) being able to convert a large file to what froogle wants seems like it would be helpful.

Maybe for people who have yahoo shopping? (I don't know how their products are stored though) or a popular shopping cart that keeps track of your products? Does Miva Merchant, Paypal, OSCommerce, X-Cart, etc, have a database where all products, description, etc are stored and have the ability to export to a certain file type?

 

well then, it sounds like it would be helpful to those who don't have the technical knowledge to do it otherwise.

we are in the process of setting up x-cart, but I don't think it is as popular as other carts out there.

i like the idea, just wouldn't know how to go about finding out what would be best and for which formats to find out how to convert first.

good luck if you do decide to do it.

 

Greetings.

I've been using Froogle since its inception (little over a year now). I would agree that the feed, by far, is the way to go to get products indexed. The G bot just doesn't seem to do a good job crawling my site, but the feed has indexed more than 175,000 products, basically everything I fed it.
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=respree

While we can all see that the G index feeds the F index. I just wish it worked the other way around (which it doesn't, BTW).

I think a program that would assist non-technical store owners would be something people might be interested in, as Froogle catches on. G is only now starting to promote it a little (i.e. first three Froogle results on the Google SERP).

I don't think the program will be without its challenges though.

Two things come to mind. URL formation and product images locations. Two fields of the feed ask 1) where's your product URL at and 2) where's your product image at. For us, it was pretty easy to do in Access because these locations are static with the item number being the variable. For others, which I can't speak for, they may be all over the place, so I'm not sure how a program could predict those locations (especially when they may not be consistent).


Food for thought.

 

Didnt read the whole thread but I have set up two customers with Froogle data feeds.

 

Shawn - dont give up...........I would love a tool like that.........however I suppose its quite easy for me.............I am just lazy and love your tools!

 

I am sending datafeeds up to froogle. I build in excel and convert to .txt

Time consuming but easy.... and I am getting great rankings.

 

Just a quick tip as most of the shopping sites I've come across have a similar format but not exactly the same sequence.

I've written simple sql statements to get the various formats out of the mysql which usually do run in the background.

Twice monthly or upon development I extract latest into various txt tab del into directories by shopping source.
Being lazy I've set up dreamweaver with all the FTP's which also keeps me up to date when I've done it last.

M
Also allows me to do tweeks like using Froogle character allowances to the max.

 

Shawn,

If your planning to write a generic froogle interface the following information may help you.

I use the EasyPopulate contribution to create the feed for my osCommerce shopping carts. It works really well. There is also froogle data checker that you need to look at because froogle field sizes are smaller than the average title and description in many shopping carts and your data will get trancated without your knowledge if you do not use it. If you do not want to install osCommerce or want to get a feel of EasyPopulate your welcome to play with the demo shopping cart software , use admin / password to get into the shopping cart administration section.

 

We have 5 sites that we upload froogle data for currently. Actually, I think that number is 6. We have our own custom backend that we have built up over the years that now exports the data via our own froogle module and then uploads once a week. This way if we make any description changes (or other mods) they will be reflected in our froogle results.

FYI, we have also signed up for yahoo's new shopping data feed deal. It has been a couple of months now and to the best of my knowledge, we have not seen one sale yet....what happened to Yahoo?

 

Hi,
is that Y .com? They still don't want me as I'm UK .....
Y UK and AOL UK etc are via Pangora.com in case you're interested.
Good stats nice service good sales.
M

 

We have a few sites, one of them has a froogle feed setup with it. Yet, the funny thing is that the one with a feed to froogle gets lower listings than the others without the feed.

 

Are you saying that using Froogle lowers one's PR?

 

Jay out of interest have you used the full text allowance on the feed?

M

 

my cart osCommerce actually creates the whole feed for me- skipping a lot of the time consuming exercises of creating it by hand.