The Froogle Concept:
Froogle takes the power of the Google search and applies it to almost all the products available on the internet.
For consumers, Froogle shortens the distance between the keyboard and the product they’re searching for. Visit Froogle and type “dog collar.” Froogle presents a list of dog collar photographs, brief descriptions, prices, and links to each site that sells dog collars.
Now, who’s that at number one for dog collars? Let the Froogle optimization begin.
Who’s Currently Eligible for Froogle?
Froogle, now in its beta (rough draft) version, is only available for US, English-Language online stores taking US dollars. They say they want Froogle running smoothly before they roll out to the rest of the world.
That’s just a temporary exclusion, but there are some sites that will never be considered for Froogle inclusion.
These exclusions include sites that sell services (though this would be a logical extension of Froogle), sites that market affiliate programs, and sites that promote for offline businesses.
It is my understanding that to be included in the Froogle data base you must sell products from your website and ship them yourself.
How To Get Listed in Froogle:
If your site is eligible for inclusion, and you’re already listed with Google, then you’re already in the Froogle index.
If you’re not listed, or if you have an extensive catalog of products that you’d like to update regularly, then you’ll need to establish a Froogle data feed.
How To Establish a Froogle Data Feed:
If you’d like to feed data about your products to Froogle, then send an email to feeds-support@google.com.
Be sure to include the following information:
- your name and title
- your phone number
- your email address
- the name of your store
- your store’s URL
- a brief description of the products you sell
They’ll send you more information. According to their site, the first step is to “create, in our feed format, a tab-delimited text file, which you can upload to us daily, weekly, or monthly.”
Again, Froogle’s not accepting feeds from foreign sites for the duration of their beta test.
What Froogle Means to Your Site:
Given the popularity of Google, you can be sure that Froogle will soon become the preferred consumer search tool for online products. If you sell products from your site, it is imperative that you know as much as possible about Froogle.
As Froogle optimization becomes an art, you can be sure to find all the best Froogle Optimization advice in murdok.
If you have any Froogle questions, please feel free to send them in, and I’ll do my best to answer them in upcoming issues of murdok.
For more information, visit the Froogle about pages:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle/about.html
Garrett French is the editor of murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
