Good Morning! I just wanted to remind my readers that Google has recently made a change to their data feed requirements. You will now be required to provide a unique product identifier for all products that you submit. The only products that are excluded from this requirement are apparel & unique one of a kind items. If you do not include these unique product identifiers in the feed, it will still process correctly, however, your products will not be shown on the engine.

This change will be implemented on May 3rd 2011 (05/03/2011).

Unique Product Identifiers [required for most categories]: With user reviews, prices, related items, and videos, “product pages” (example: Canon S95) help users make decisions about what to buy. To help us match product listings to these pages, we ask merchants to provide “unique product identifiers.” Starting May 3, we will require unique identifiers for all products except apparel and one-of-a-kind items. Products without unique product identifiers may not be listed in Google Product Search, though the feed may not be disapproved. To learn more about these identifiers, please visit our Help Center.

In the image below Google defines some of the unique product identifiers:

In this image Google defines which unique product identifiers are required based on the product’s category:

As you can see for the majority of products that will be submit to Google you need to have two of these three unique product identifiers:

1. UPC, EAN, JAN
2. Brand
3. MPN

Also don’t forget that on June 6th 2011 (06/06/2011) Google will begin requiring that merchants provide accurate tax and shipping information for their products. Here is a brief synopsis of those upcoming changes (provided by Google):

Shipping Information [required] When shoppers are trying to find the best deal, online or offline, they need to know the full cost of an item – including the cost of shipping. To help them accurately compare prices, we will begin requiring shipping information for Google Product Search on June 6th. After that date, we may disapprove feeds from accounts that do not include this information. Please visit this Help Center article to learn more about how to specify shipping costs either at the account or item level.

Tax Information [required]: To ensure that shoppers have a seamless experience when they click through from Google Product Search to your site, we’re making tax information required for all feeds targeting the United States. As we’re doing with shipping cost information, we will be making this change on June 6th; after that date, product listings that do not include tax information at the account level, or in the “tax” attribute, may be rejected. You can learn more about providing tax information in this Help Center article. (Please note that feeds targeted to countries other than the United States already require inclusion of VAT in the “price” attribute.)

You can read the full blog post from Google about these changes by clicking HERE.

Ok, I have to get back to doing some feed optimization to ensure all of my clients are prepared for these changes! As always, if you have any questions feel free to contact me.

CSE.Manager@gmail.com