Google Base & Importance of Merchant Attributes
Brian Smith of Comparison Engines has been doing some product searches at Google Base only to find very little products listed for some popular terms. Seems that merchants are overlooking or paying little attention to the optional fields in Google Base which allow merchants to set up their own custom attributes.
Eventually, when you type in ’sony plasma tv $2000? into Google, I’d assume a subset of the matching results from Google Base will be displayed, but that doesn’t currently happen.
From a merchant perspective, it’s time to use as many of those optional fields (for Google Base and all the other engines) as possible. Google Base happens to be the only shopping search engine which allows merchants to define their own attributes (optional fields). Here are Google’s instructions for setting up custom attributes. I’ve tested out the ’string’ type attribute with some success. If you want better results on the shopping engines, try optimizing your feed – it’s no longer good enough to just post all your products and expect your listings to be found.
Think of these custom attributes as a way for merchants to tag their products with the meta data needed for consumers to find them in Google.
Attributes available for ‘tagging’ include brand name, megapixels, location, promotional offers and site URL’s.
