6 replies to this topic

[marybetht]

Not sure when it happened, but was good while it lasted. Produced quite a few hits while it was up there.

Mary Beth

[OldWelshGuy]

Your right, I hadn't noticed that they have removed it. Is everyone seeing this?

Google are testing stuff out aren't they

What are they going to do long term I wonder?... happy days!

[Grumpus]

I'm sure the link was just up there to capitalize on the Holiday buying season.

While Froogle is a pretty spiffy piece of programming - it still has a long way to go. Over at Cre8asite the other day, we were chuckling about how one of our Moderators - picture and all - was up for sale on Froogle for a mere $99.99.

Some companies feed Froogle a list of products via delimited files. This is easy. The impressive part is that, with about 75-85% accuracy, a huge number of the products listed are things that they pick up during the crawl. It spiders sites and, through navigational and page structure, identifies products. (This is one of several reasons why I say it is critical nowadays to have a good navigational structure and consistent page layout).

The problem Froogle has is that very few sites (as a percentage of the whole) make good use of these elements. In order to get "natural" (i.e. non-feed generated) products in there, they've had to loosen the identification criteria. This means that some things are still getting in there that don't belong.

I'm still impressed at how accurate Froogle is. And if you take a little time to study Froogle, it'll go a long way to help you optimize your site for the regular side of Google. Much of the physical criteria that'll get you into Froogle is also used as a part of the ranking algo up on the front side of Google.

It'll get there - in time. But it ain't quite ready for prime-time... yet...

G.

[marybetht]

Grumpus,

I'm cracking up over your moderator being on sale that is too funny! I've seen some odd ball stuff on Froogle as well, so I started sending them product feeds a few months ago, so our product descriptions and pics would match. It's a pretty easy process, and the best part is it's FREE!

Mary Beth

[Grumpus]

Yup yup. Feeds are good.

Problem is, we don't actually sell anything in the forums, so there's nothing to feed them.

And, the reason Google thought that maybe there were products there is because of the way I have our web directory structured. In it, there is a live feed of Amazon products that relate to the directory category you are browsing. (Froogle loves my product feeds because of the nav structure - that is until someone blows the whistle and tells Google that it's an affiliate feed and it gets manually removed from the listings).

Then, there's also a set of related topics in the forums to that directory. For consistency's sake, those links are formatted similarly to the product feed - except the links to go the forums. So, no one has said, "Hey, those aren't products!" to Google and they didn't get tripped by our "Affiliate Flag" because they are on a different domain.

So now, we're stuck with a bunch of oddball forum listings in Froogle until someone blows the whistle or until Google makes an improvement in their programming. It's good to watch and keep an eye on this kind of thing as it evolves though. Froogle's a lot easier to crack than Google and therefore it's easier to isolate elements that are also being used in the main Google algo.

G.

[Jill]

Froogle is still at the top with some listings from where I sit. It just showed up for a search on wood blinds.

Jill

[marybetht]

Still at the top for me too, while searching on "Bruce Springsteen."