Google Base has made an update that from reading the blog post and email sounded like requirements for each item. They have added UPC, MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) and ISBN to the list of attributes for Google Base submissions. Google says:

“We recently added UPC, MPN and ISBN to the list of required attributes for bulk uploads of the Products item type. Providing this information will help us rank items better and allow us to deliver more relevant results to our users. Starting today, we’re asking everyone whose items are in the category of products and use these unique identifiers to begin including them for their items. As we will be using this information to categorize your items, please take particular care in the values you provide for these attributes. Only universally-recognized values should be included for these three attributes. Not including accurate values for these fields can have a negative effect on the ranking of your items.” You can read the entire blog post here.

What does this mean to you? Well from the blog post it sounds like they are going to use these fields as how they will accept products and also categorize them. However that is not the case at all. From researching this a bit more it actually is going to be a great way for them to help categorize merchant’s products more efficiently. For the products which have these numbers or codes available the merchant should include this information in their upload. However if these values are not available to you, or your products are unique and these values would be irrelevant you may simply leave these fields blank or discard them from your upload. The new attributes true purpose is best said by a rep from the Google Base team, “these attributes are intended to allow us to categorize items in popular and standardized product types in order to return more relevant results to our users.” You can also read some other frequently asked questions.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under FeedPerfect News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.