Froogle feed

[slyn4ice]

Huy guys,

I have a quick question about Froogle's feed.
On their help page they say they use the description field of your products to match up keyphrases and products.
Unfortunately, we are in a line of business where most of our products do not need (and don't have) any description. It would be very frustrating for us and for the customers (they'll be able to see the description on our site) to have to fabricate "pseudo" descriptions for 500+ products.
Question is: do you think we'll be penalized in any way if we submit identical fields for description and name? What else do you think comes in when Froogle tries to match products and keywords?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,
Slavi

[flood6]

Well, I know it is really important to froogle to have what you feed them match what is on your site. So if you don't have descriptions on your site, and you submit descriptions to them, they might get upset if they find out.

I assume you are talking about the site in your sig. I looked real quick and saw that your individual products don't seem to have their own page and no place for the description; is this where the problem is coming from?

You might want to modify your cart (I realize this is not going to be an easy job) so that each product has it's own page and description. Or at least modify the current page so that each product has its own description. Both of these will help with your SERPs, too.

It has been my experience (of couse this was in Froogle's earlier days) that the froogle team was very responsive to questions from merchants. You might try shooting them your question. There is a "contact us" link at the bottom of this page.

[slyn4ice]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions!

During the past week i figured out much of out you were saying and i have to say i am impressed with the speed Froogle reps reply (and that they replied at all :) ).

As far as dascriptions/product names go, i got an email from froogle saying i should leave the desc field blank if there is no description on the site. Today i got a second (almost identical) reply to the same email saying it is ok to put the product name in the description field. So ... :) i am confused.

As far as reorganizing the site and the shopping cart: the original Oscommerce project we are using/modifying does have individual pages for each product, but for our site it makes absolutely no sense since about 80% of the products have no descriptions (and need no desc). It looks ugly and pointless. It is an empty page with the thumb of the product - makes no sense (for the customer at least). So we modified it to a "Read more" feature - if a product has a desc, it goes to the "product page" and you can read the desc there.

So, we haven't submitted a feed yet - working on an automated function to do all that with a click of a button, but we'll keep you posted on how things go.

Thanks,
Svetoslav