Google Base (FROOGLE) Changes, why they wont accept automatically actinic bulk sites

[dangermouse116]

firstly please note there is a work around which is manually creating a section for each product......we have over 9500 products so this is completely unviable. I also use the mash from mole end but that only places markers to the products and google have not approved this method recently too

ok heres the jist

i recieved an email from google

Hello Chris,

Thank you for submitting a bulk upload to Google Base. We have reviewed your bulk upload and need you to make changes. Your bulk upload has been disapproved due to the reason(s) listed below.

Issues:

- Multiple items listed on the same page

-----------------
- Multiple items listed on the same page: We noticed some of the links you provided for your items lead to pages that lists other items as well. In order to provide a better user experience, we only accept links to item pages that list a single item. Please include URLs for pages specific to each item and remove from your bulk upload any items without individual pages.

After you have made the necessary change(s), please upload a new version of your bulk upload. We will notify you if we need you to make any additional corrections. Otherwise, we will send you an email to let you know that your bulk upload has been approved.

Yours sincerely,

The Google Team

i was like huh wt* so i contacted technical support and waited for 20 mins while the tech support read the forums and told me he would get back to me. Lol well we can all gues that didnt happen so i rang sales and they told me that the only fix to this problem will be to do it manually and that there is nothing planned to add a feature which would do it, they also suggested that i use the mole end product so i updated the feed with the mole-end version and then recieved this

Hello Chris,

Thank you for letting us know that you've uploaded an updated version of your bulk upload. One of our specialists will review your file and notify you regarding its status.

As for the one item per page policy, we are constantly working to provide our users with the best search experience possible, and we believe this new policy will help us get closer to our goal. We understand that it may take time for you to change the layout of your website. For now, you can include in your bulk upload items that do have single item pages. As you change your multiple items webpages to single item pages, you can add the new ones gradually to your bulk upload. We appreciate your cooperation.

Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Karin
The Google Team

so if anyone has a work around please help as actinic have told me that there is not a work around planned. google base/froogle has been such a huge contibuter to sales i am considering on changing shopping carts instead of manually making 9500+ sections (i know sounds ridiculous) because the export import would take about 500 hours less than making sections for each product. (soz for any spell errors)

[leehack]

I had this recently too and laughed at it and put it back in the to do list.

If you can create a new store in a new package which meets Google's rules in a quicker time than amending your actinic store, i'd be very surprised but also delighted to learn how.

Google is taking over and people like yourself are now dependant on Google - stop the rot people, take back control, it is our WWW, not Google's.

The worldwide revolt of Google for a month, should start right here and right now.

[dangermouse116]

google

i completely agree with you they are monster taking over the web but when the majority of sales are based upon their search engine and there is no way around this. literally 1/4 of sales are lost because of this

The method to change carts is a find another cart provider "this alone is no easy task" then export your cart to a csv file strip out the html from your live site and rebuild the template in the new cart system and do the csv import and configure to commerce providers. Ove done this from version 7-8.5 and it took me 2 days to get it correct (that doesnt include the bug fixes which had to be done by actinic) 16 hours is a walk in the park compared to actinics proposed walk around. Id prefer a work around though since i paid so much cashola for actinic

[RuralWeb]

One possible way is to use the product reference as the url by modifying the feed??

[dangermouse116]

do you mean use the extended info? if so that would work but would just have people coming in from google to a blank page with just the product info. none of the rest of the shop info would be displayed. Is there a way to get the extended info to be a normal page within the sites normal formatting?

[TraceyHand]

I got the same (initial) email from Google when I recently uploaded a feed (I posted it here actually)

All I did was change the mash to link to products (rather than pages) and it was subsequently accepted.

[leehack]

Chris

You can export to csv from actinic and use some nifty excel formulas to do a lot of it, they would take some time setting up, but still far quicker than setting up a new cart IMO. The SEO on the pages is the real headache, which you would have with any cart change. Access could also do a lot of the work for you, but as you say still a headache and duplicate page names is a definite possibility.

I like Google and i use it occasionally, but i don't like anything having power over my decisions when i can help it. I've been using MSN for nearly 6 months now and i never fail to find what i want. Google are good for sure, but they are certainly not as good as they are perceived. Achieving good SERPS with them is not about following their rules, it's about knowing which ones you can willingly flout.

Rest assured their monopoly will be worse than Microsoft's, if it is not already. SERPS is not their main goal, earning money is. For that alone i say bye bye as they have offered me nothing more than MSN has, in the last 6 months of my experiment.

[dangermouse116]

yup thats what i did and recieved

Hello Chris,

Thank you for submitting a bulk upload to Google Base. We have reviewed your bulk upload and need you to make changes. Your bulk upload has been disapproved due to the reason(s) listed below.

Issue:

Multiple items listed on the same page: We noticed some of the links you provided for your items lead to pages that lists other items as well.
In order to provide a better user experience, we only accept links to item pages that list a single item. Please include URLs for pages specific to each item and remove from your bulk upload any items without individual pages.

After you have made the necessary change(s), please upload a new version of your bulk upload. We will notify you if we need you to make any additional corrections. Otherwise, we will send you an email to let you know that your bulk upload has been approved.

Yours sincerely,

The Google Team

[Jan]

A lot of people are getting this now, what I have found is that they will say that they have rejected your feed but will continue to list it anyway.

We had this on one site and had to move the products into their own sections before they accepted it.

I think that they will try this for a while and then as people stop listing they will revise the policy, so I would leave things as they are and wait and see what happens.

If they have actually stopped listing you I would suggest picking out products you most want to list on Google and adding those to a new section where they are in their own section and only listing those (use the exclude from Froogle on the section to exclude all of the others).

Regards,

[RuralWeb]

do you mean use the extended info

No - use the product reference url as you see used in best sellers. This would then give a separate url for each product even though its on a multiple product page - worth a try to see if it works?

[dangermouse116]

ahhhh yeah i tried that and the third quote down in the thread is the reply i got

[RuralWeb]

i tried that and the third quote down in the thread is the reply i got

Well the only option is to use the extended info page and mod it to be a single product page as per the AUG or change to single product pages which is easier in V8 than 7 but still alot of work

[gabrielcrowe]

its only url sensetive, not content sensetive, so put a querystring at the end of your urls.

a random number.

ugly hack huh?

[Jan]

its only url sensetive, not content sensetive

Sometimes it is, sometimes is isn't. My product mash can generate unique URLs for each product but Google accepts them from some people but not from others.

Regards,

[dangermouse116]

yeah but the buggers are checking it and declining my feed. surely they have better things to do like ummmmm oh count their mountains of cash and stop kicking the little guys. what winds me up is this is soo 1990's. Google sneezes and the rest of the world gets the flu