Attention Yahoo! Merchant Solutions store owners!
Yahoo has added an option to enable your objinfo.xml and your catalog.xml files but not to syndicate them. What this means is that Yahoo! will not send your product catalog to Comparison Shopping Engines for you. This is great news for those merchants who submit data feeds on their own or by using programs such as FeedPerfect or Merchant Advantage.
“Select “Enable” to let shopping comparison engines and other third-party sites download your catalog of products. We’ll submit a link to these files to Google Base and provide other shopping comparison engines with access to the files.
Select “Enable but do not syndicate” if you wish to enable the XML files, but do not want the files to be sent to Google Base or other shopping comparison engines (for example, if you’d like to manage your own product feeds).
The files will be updated each time you publish your store or catalog.”
Source: Yahoo Merchant Solutions
If you are a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions store owner who has tried to submit to Google Products Search via Google Base / Merchant Center; you probably have gotten the error :
This error was caused by Yahoo! submitting your product catalog to Google Base / Merchant Center for you. This happens automatically if you have your .xml files set to enable (which in the past was the only options besides disable.)
I have seen a lot of work around’s used to get past this error; including adding /index.html to the URL so it would be unique. This would “fool” Google Base / Merchant Center into letting you continue, but would lead to duplicate listings on Google Product Search since two feeds would technically be getting submit.
The only other sure fire way to fix this was to contact Google Base / Merchant Center using this form: URL in use – Google Base Help but this could take days to get resolved a you have to work with the technical support team and they need to prove that you are really the owner of the domain.
So when you enable your objinfo.xml and catalog.xml files for the first time (or if you already have them enabled) make sure to set them to ” enable but do not syndicate” this will help you avoid all of the potential problems above.
Hope this helps!!
