It happens regularly. Someone finds out how easy it is to get listed in Google product search, they submit an affiliate feed or site, list products with misleading prices, or just generally spam for popular product types. There’s got to be a way to kill those listings, right?
Absolutely. They even make it easy. Just go to base.google.com, search for the product, find the listing and click the “Report Listing” link.
One of the simple changes you can make to your feed is the product name, which is similar to a title tag on a website. It ends up being the hypertext people click on, so it can affect clickthrough rates just like good ad titles for PPC or good page titles and snippets for organic results. But what exactly makes for a good title?
Well, just like PPC and Organics, your results may vary. However, what I’ve found to work well is a combination of things.
I’ve been sort of wondering this for a while, but at SES I heard a response from a Google rep in a session that made a lot of sense.
Since we know that onebox refers to the fact that there is just one search box, Universal is technically onebox results. He said to think of Universal as “Onebox Version 2″. Universal, which has a lot of people really freaked out, is just an evolution of the onebox results that we’ve been seeing for years and really isn’t something to fear, but rather something to learn, understand, love and dominate. Don’t look at it as something getting in the way of the organic results… think of it as opportunities to do something different for once to end up on the same first page of search results.
There’s been some confusion over this name, not only from newbies, but also among some experienced SEO’s and marketers. You see, Onebox results have nothing to do with the little “Box” drawn around them (imaginary or otherwise). In fact, the name isn’t from those results at all. It all goes back to the page before your results - the search page. These results come about from a single search box (one box) on the Google homepage, presenting you with options without having to search in any different manner than you’re accustomed to.
David and I were interviewed in New York by WebProNews. You can view it here.
As has been covered elsewhere in the blogosphere, Froogle is no more. Rising up from the ashes is Google Product Search. While more descriptive, one has to wonder what this really means to those of us optimizing for Base.
First off, the attributes used for narrowing the search have moved to the bottom of the page. This means more people are likely to click on something optimized generally than something optimized for attributes. A favorite trick of some feed optimizers has been including attributes your competitors don’t, then hoping that attribute gets featured. This may be less effective now, so paying more attention to the overall ranking is important.
I’ve been busy developing some stuff on the backend of BaseOp, so I haven’t had a post here in a bit. I’m hoping to make several major announcements after I return from SES. Stay tuned… I should have 2 - 3 pretty big announcements over the next several weeks.
For all my readers / listeners, I apologize for the lack of activity lately. It will get better shortly.
For those that haven’t noticed, Google Onebox has been on vacation at some datacenters. This has led to my inbox getting rumors into it. To discuss this, I have David with me on the podcast, but his comments won’t be on the blog post. So, here are some of the rumors that have been going around and a few of my thoughts.
1) More Onebox Options
There are plenty of options already, but I could see more content being highlighted being a good thing.
Google seems to think you can post just about anything into Google base. They list the following on their site:
Examples of popular item types:
Examples of other interesting item types:
Thanks to David Brown, I now have a demo video available on the site. Just use the “What is Onebox” link to the right, or use this link to go to the OneBox Demo video. Hopefully, anyone that has been wondering what this is all about will find the video useful.
Brian Mark is a forum regular around the web and a speaker at Search Engine Strategies. He has worked at ToolBarn.com since 1999, taking the online retailer of power tools from a few orders per week to an Internet Retailer Top 500 company.
