Yesterday you may have received an email from The Google Team requesting how to claim your URL. This is a new additional requirement to the previous site verification requirement. While many accounts can verify the same URL for tracking purposes, only one will be authorized for uploading products. This domain claiming allows Google to know which account is authorized to feed products to Google Product Search.

These changes will therefore effect FeedPerfect users as well as merchants that do manual product uploads to Google Product Search.

Regardless of how you get products to Google, until you complete the process you will receive email warnings after each upload. The new requirement will become mandatory on May 18th. After that your uploads will fail unless you have verified and claimed your URL.

The actual “Claim this URL” button will appear in Google Merchant Center once you have completed the site verification. To get there, you simply need to verify your site and then click Claim on the Merchant Center > Settings > General Page. Before proceeding log into Google Merchant Center. If you already see the “Claim this URL” link, simply click it and you are done.

If you don’t see the “Claim this URL link”,  you will need to complete the site verification process and then claim your domain.

Google offers two options for verification:

1. Add a meta tag to your site’s home page.
2. Upload an HTML file to the site’s directory.

Either will work, but different platforms have different abilities from the shopping cart end. The Meta Tag is the easiest option if your platform allows it.

Some examples are below for Yahoo! Store owners.

Meta Tag option on Yahoo! Stores:

1. Go to your Yahoo! Store editor and navigate to your index.html page.
2. In the Message field paste the unique tag from Google Merchant Center.
3. Update the page and publish your store.
4. You should now be able to verify the store in Google, and then Claim your URL.

The FeedPerfect Team

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 5:15 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.