google products auto resubmission error

[Daveb]

Hi Guys.

The Automatic resubmission of the Google feed is bringing up the following rejection from Google.

Feed file is in a format that we don't support: HTML. Please make sure you upload your feeds in one of our documented formats.

Manuel upload of the same file works fine.

Anybody see this before?

Thx
Dave

[Steve G Griggs]

Never seen that error, and I have been auto submitting for a while now...that's an odd one, have you tried deleting the google products file from your site 1 folder and creating a new one in case it's got corrupted?

[Daveb]

Tried twice with same result.
Agree it's odd, and the same file from the Site 1 folder done as a "Manuel Upload" is accepted without issue..

Pretty sure, but not a hundred percent sure, that this is an Actinic issue and not a Google issue.

Any opinions as to whether this should be submitted to Actinic support, or Google?

Dave

[Steve G Griggs]

Difficult to say. If you have Actinic support I would say give them a call and see what they say. It seems a very odd error. I can't quite understand how the auto feed isn't accepted and the same file is accepted on manual submission. It does seem more like a Google problem than an Actinic bug. As I said we have been doing the same without any problems, and I haven't seen anything on the forum similar to this.

It could be the file has got corrupted on the server in some way. Can you access the server with an ftp programme, delete the Google product feed file, and ftp a replacement one? I feel that might be worth trying.

[cheaptents]

May or may not be related but recently google capped the number of products you can have in a feed and the number of feeds you can have. They claim it is temporary but meant our upload failed with similar results to what has been said. Auto uploading a big feed was our issue so we exported our feed and chopped it into 3 chunks, then uploaded manually. Give it a try.

[Daveb]

Andy
This can be overcome by re-using a feed that is dated prior to Nov 21, 2011.
Not sure why, but it works.
Dave

[cheaptents]

thanks, found that on a blog this morning...

I was talking with someone in Google (uk) who works for a different team, he mentioned in passing there are a fair few system updates going on within shopping / products / mobile shopping / catalogs etc to make them work more in sync and also weed out the rubbish ... from what I gather part of the update will be removing most of the common descriptions (aka manufacturer descriptions) where nothing has been changed ... it makes sense as they would likely rank the same as other sites as its the same content i guess (dont quote me on this though, its all hearsay from my friend).

Anyway apparently things will return to a less limited way of working in the next few weeks ... just a shame they did it right before our busiest period