A New Filter Could Be Hiding Your Products On Google Product Search
I was running into an issue with one of my clients’ entire product lines not displaying on Google’s Product Search. I am going to take a moment to explain why the items weren’t displaying, and help prevent some headaches if some of your items have recently disappeared too.
The item my client sells are Enesco “Growing Up Girls” Figurines. In the Google Merchant Center everything was correct: All of his UPC’s were entered, he had all his brands populated, as well as all of his MPN’s. There were no tell-tale signs as to why this entire product line was not displaying for any of his shoppers.
After troubleshooting a bit, I figured out why no one was able to view his items: Google’s new SafeSite Search Filter. Even if you are not logged into a Google account, by default, Google is now moderately filtering all search results. This is for both product searches, as well as regular web searches. This is why the items were not displaying. It was because a “Growing Up Girls Blonde Age 14 Figurine” was enough to get filtered out.
I contacted Google to see if they could simply just turn the items back on. Here was their reply:
“If you feel that your item has been incorrectly categorized as adult, we recommend removing any mature language or content from your item. However, as our results aren’t biased by human intervention, we’re unable to provide guidelines for making specific items appear when SafeSearch is enabled.”
So this is something to be aware of if your items can be misconstrued as adult content. In order to stay in front of the majority of Google Product Search users, you will need to reword your content to get around the Safe Search filters.
Google’s other suggestion was to turn off SafeSearch.
To turn the SafeSearch filter off:
1) Hit the Cog Icon in the upper right corner of Google.com
2) Click “Search settings”
3) Scroll to the SafeSearch options, and choose “Do not filter my search results”
4) Click Save at the bottom of the page.
Good luck, and if you have any questions on this, or anything comparison shopping engine related, please feel free to email me at feedperfectblog@gmail.com.