Froogle Update?

What happened with Froogle? Our traffic was down 80% yesterday and today looks just as bad.
I see some minor cosmetic changes like Adsense across the top, but have they changed this algo too? Our products are buried, even though they have +18,000 cataloged.

 

Actually the changes are pretty significant.

Not only are there blocks of adwords across the top (and bottom) but you can get more product details without going to the actual merchant sites!

This has really killed my Froogle conversions. My rankings are the same but conversions are WAY down!

It's not even clear how to get to the merchant site for the product you're interested in.

Search Results-


Item Detail-

 

Wow... this doesn't look good. So much for Google/Froogle staying "clean and simple". What a mess.

 

A mess is right!

You can't tell me that people are going to realize that you need to click on the merchant's name to get to that product in their store.

And the listing that Froog's pulls the description from isn't even first in the list! It's in the description text but I doubt that will get clicked.

I really do not like this. I guess it will boost Adwords clicks for Google though.

Damn, I knew it was too good to last!

 

It could effect Froogle merchants to the point where they stop submitting feeds... Even though it's free. Thats bad for Froogle, very bad. I hope they come to their senses and get rid of it

 

What is this 'Merchant Rating' thing? And how do I use it?

 

It only shows for sites that have ratings from other shopping sites. Kinda weird that they haven't implemented their own rating system.

http://froogle.google.com/froogle/reviews?cid=948dadb9d916385e&fq=digital+cameras&hl=en

Look on the left column under "Review Sources"

 

Now this is really getting screwy!

When I click on a product while in 'List View', the link goes directly to the merchant's site. When I click on the SAME product while in 'Grid View', it goes to the Froogle item detail page w/ all of the adwords displayed.

I guess they're testing things out.

 

We submit a feed every few days and have always been well represented in Froogle. Now I see a small number of competitors dominating the search results, and we're in position 100.
Hopefully things change back soon.

 

They used to also have it where you could list items in order of price in a prominent spot. Since they moved that my conversions are gone (we carry low priced items). Now it seems like they may finally be focusing on paid ads for premier listings like other services. That's unfortunate.

Ian

 

You can still sort by price. They moved it to the upper right... you can make out a portion of it just below the Adwords in Crazy Rob's pic above.

 

I see things getting a little better since last night.
I wonder if Google's Jagger Update has anything to do with this?
Could they be trying to clean up Google to only show non-e-com sites and move all e-com sites into Froogle?

 

I doubt it. Most people don't even know what Froogle is. This is just amnother way to drive Adsense clicks and $$$.