Google Base asks the questions...
It would appear I've stumbled upon a new Google Base feature or test feature. Today when I logged into my dashboard to check my feeds status i was face with this (fig 1). Google Base stating 'We have 3 questions about your items'
for one of my feeds. Clicking the link on this new message lead me to the introduction page (fig 2) which has a very interesting message.
Help us understand your items
Google Base has automatically added descriptive attributes to you items by analysing their titles and descriptions. These additional attributes improve the quality of your items and help searchers find them more easily.
In some cases, we may need you help to understand your items and successfully add attributes to them. For example if an item has a brand name that we have not seen before, we may ask you to confirm this is is, in fact, a brand name.
The interesting part being the automatic adding of attributes to you items by Google Base. So this means Google Base is a bit more smarter than it seems, analyzing your items and data and creating it own custom attributes for you.
The 3 questions I encountered where all surrounding brand names (like in fig 3). Once you complete the questions the message and all evidence of the questions disappear. So it was handy i took screen shots as i went ;)
Image Gallery
 | Fig 1
Dashboard Questions Message ScreenShot
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 | Fig 2
Question Introduction ScreenShot
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 | Fig 3
Question ScreenShot
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 | Fig 4
Question Finished ScreenShot
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Google Base Error - Too Many Formatting Errors
From time to time you might see a a rather worrying error from google base regarding your last uploaded feed.
Bulk upload failed. No items are live.There are too many formatting errors.
(see screenshot above)
Too many formatting errors problem can sometimes be caused by a file that wasn't uploaded properly. I've experience this happen through both the FTP method and uploading through the dashboard.
Try waiting a few hours and trying again this normally resolves the problem.
Make sure your upload in binary and the transfer fully completes however.
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New expiration_date attribute causing you problems ?
Since the introduction of some new required attributes for Google Base feeds people have been having problems understanding how and when to use them.
expiration_date is one of those, and if set-up wrongly could means none of your items appearing at all.
Heres Google Base's help documentation description of this new attribute.
| expiration_date |
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The date that the item listing expires or that information about this item is going to change.
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Format:
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Tab-delimited example:2006-12-20
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XML example: <g:expiration_date>2006-12-20</g:expiration_date>
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This is more a base item reference than actually when the physical product expires.
Some people are seeing this as the expiration of the product like a sell by date for food. To be honest its not really clear from the description that it is. Theres been people on the Google Base Group asking how they can check every products sell by date and add this data to base !
This is to tell Google Base when each product expires or the sale ends like for example eBay would use this to list all their items and when the items bidding ended.
This is difficult to set-up if you have items especially on ebay that you list on base. Some people are making the mistake of uploading a file with dates in the past and this is making no items appear at all because by the time they are uploaded they are already expired.
Heres my top tip for making sure your items are never affected and are always active on google base for the longest time possible.
Set the date on all your products to 2012-12-12 or a date in the far off future. Then Google Base defaults and they all expire in 30 days.
So if you set them to all expire in 2012-12-12 and upload them on the 14th April 2007 then they will all default and be set to expire in 30 days, in this case 14th May 2007.
It's as easy as that.
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Google Base Ideas
Heres some of my suggestions for Google Base's future: -
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A progress meter (especially for larger feeds mine is over 500,000 items and takes a age to process and requires me to continually check the system)- detailing the processing of the items and also how many are waiting/are searchable.
- Detailed notifications by email - that a feed has been processed, update on the number of items searchable.
- A note on the individual bulk upload of the file size and item limit.(e.g. 20MB - 100,000 items) Currently you only see this when you creating the bulk upload not when you to upload it.
- A note on how much of the limits you have used 15MB of 20MB | 350,000 of 500,000 - some people including myself have feeds with increased limits.
- Take away the limit on the active item count the dasboard should show all your items.
- Allow us to search the items we list through the dashboard so we can quickly find/edit items.
- Allow html in xml descriptions. For those people on host items on Google Base
- Allow use to be able to define a froogle category for our feed/individual items
- Make the reporting stats columns filterable by count asc/desc
- Make the reporting stats data exportable - it would be excellence for us to use this data in our back-end stats system
- Fix the confusion between the UK version and US - clearly display what system you are in on the dashboard and let us easily swap between them
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All Google Base items disappear ?
A lot of people are mistaking the different regional versions of Google Base. Basically signing into the UK system listing and then go through the US version and seeing no items at all.
Partial blame for this unnecessary confusion is down to Google by not clearly marking and differentiating the different regional versions.
heres a brief overview of the current setup:
UK - base.google.co.uk
- items get pushed to base.google.co.uk, then to google.co.uk/products and google.co.uk onebox results
US - base.google.com
- items get pushed to base.google.com, then to google.com/products and google.com onebox results
DE - base.google.de
- items get pushed to base.google.de, then to google.de/products and google.de onebox results
The most annoying thing i find is that when i log into my google account the Base link under my services takes me to base.google.com.
This is an outstanding issue Google are working on but for the most part its a unnecessary roadblock for most.
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Changing how your seller name appears
This is something that yet again can be used an a optimzation method for your feed. Some people include thier telephone number, some thier website and others try to do it all and its get truncated.
Changing this setting however can be difficult, this can be changed through your settings on your account or if you have a multi client account through each clients individual settings.
Once changed however this doesn't take immediate effect I've found. If you have a substantial feed (say 100,000+) this can take a while to filter through the Google Base database and in some cases it requires a full new bulk upload.
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 Need help with your Google Base data feed ?
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