SEOenthusiast

Froogle and Google Base
Google's Froogle is a prime means of free search engine marketing. They offer to list your products and services completely free and to appear right at the top of the SERP's for searches that are appropriate. Who would decline? The uninitiated, the impatient, or both. From 2004 to 2006 Google came up with feature after feature, product after product - and the various features didn't work very well together - the same login wasn't valid across the suite, sitemaps couldn't be held easily across domains (such as google.co.uk and google.com) and still features/products came flooding out of Mountain View in California. Froogle is a good example. Now merged with Google Base, customers don't really have much idea of whether they need to look into Base or into Froogle, or what the difference is. But, customers don't need to worry about such things. It's worth getting to grips with the unwieldy Base/Google multi-headed monster for the great results in yields in the SEM part of your optimisation campaign. Once succeeding, you need to keep on top of it too.
Go to Google Base by searching for 'Google Base'. If you're in the UK, make sure that the domain is google.co.uk (the entire URL is http://base.google.co.uk - without the www normal sub-prefix - 'base' is a subdomain), follow the same rule for other countries. Open an account or use an existing account if you have one, such as adwords (though odly, not adsense). Choose to submit a bulk feed, at which point, for some arcane reason you'll be prompted to log in again, then look at the various options for feed types. If you already have an RSS feed for your products, you can submit this, but some information will likely be missing, so you may prefer to construct a text file according to Google's field pattern - this allows you to include key words and key phrases to be picked up for appropriate searches. Submit it. Easy.
Did you miss it? Did you think it was easy? The difficult part is 'construct a text file'. You may have to take an iterative approach to this, but once the main work is done, it'll be a matter of tweaking it for Google to be able to pick it up for searches. But when you think of your entire product or service offering, it may well be a tedious process to construct the file. TurnerDow had a client who, after much work from us, had many search results that had a PPC advert at the top of the page, an entry in a Froogle result just underneath and did well in the organic results next down the page. To complicate matters, the client had a USA site too, with distinct offerings, and a separate Froogle account with a distinct password was needed to get the products listed in base and Froogle in the UK and the US. Constructing the text file for products was a tedious and difficult process.
Google didn't appear to intend Froogle and Base to have entries from companies that are using it as an advertising medium. For that reason you need to submit the file every month. Where prices change, products are retired, or new products are added, the file has to be kept up to date. For a free advertising medium - it's worth the fuss to get your adverts at the top of page.
Froogle and Google Base is a gift from the Google Gods that we need to take advantage of. It's free and once we've get the feed right, it's very useful to have those extra entries at the top of the SERP's.
Further Reading: Froogle's Evolution | Froogle Basic Overview


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