New Google Product Feed Requirements

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by Yahoo! Small Business Team

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Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Google Merchant Center (previously known as Google Base) is changing its Google Product Search feed specification. Read the announcement from Google and the new feed specification details.

Merchants who wish to improve the probability of having their products featured in Google Product Search are encouraged to review Google’s changes and the updates we released to Catalog Manager this morning that are intended to help make these changes easier for merchants to implement.

Key changes are described below. Please refer to our help page for more information about these changes and the steps you’ll need to take to update your product feed.

Availability
Google now accepts four pre-defined values for availability: in stock, available for order, out of stock, and pre-order. You can add these values to the availability field in one of two ways (outlined in our help page) so they are written into your catalog.xml file. The values for the availability field within your store will change from what the previous values were, but this change is not expected to have any other impacts unless you have defined custom behavior that is based on the previous Yahoo! default values for the availability field.

Image Link
Images are required to be associated with an image_link field. Google has recommendations on size and resolution. Please refer to our help page for instructions to add this field.

Additional Image Link
You can include up to 10 additional images per item. These should be defined using the additional_image_link attribute. If you are renaming an existing field to additional_image_link, please ensure that changes are reflected in your RTML templates to prevent broken images. If you are uncertain as to whether or not renaming an existing field for additional product images will require changes to your templates, please contact your developer.

Product Category
Please review Google’s information about relevant product categories. If your store carries items belonging to applicable categories, please ensure that you add the google_product_category field as required. If you sell apparel, please review this article from Google for information on required fields and attributes.

Making these changes is strongly recommended for merchants who wish to ensure that their products are included or continue to be included in Google Product Search. If you are not comfortable with making these changes yourself, we encourage you to contact one of our Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer partners that provides feed services to make these changes on your behalf.

Shiva Prakash
Yahoo! Small Business
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