Froogle Plugin is DANGEROUS to use.

Set up a site in april. Sales doing fine, growing exponentially.
6 to 10 orders a day everyday in three months.
Traffic up, bounce rate going down and building significant backlinks.
Was making great progress and decided to try setting up the Froogle Plugin.

On the plugin it asks you to select a category you want to put your
products in. I clicked on it and it seemed to take a little bit to populate
like it was getting the categories from a google server somewhere.
I selected Hardware Store > Plumbing Parts
I generated a feed but did not submit the feed. I clicked save and exited.

Then.....

The very next day after doing this. 1 order, next day 2 orders, next day 2 orders
we haven't had more than 2 orders a day since enabling this Froogle plugin.
We were selling tons of faucet parts, toilet parts, faucet and shower cartridges.
Now we only get orders for toilet handles, toilet flappers and general plumbing
parts you can find in any hardware store.

Two days later I get a call from and seo company asking if we would like to seo our
"New" website. They were just informed we had set up a website. So after talking for
a little bit she says well google has you indexed as Hardware > Plumbing Supplies.
The same category selected in the Froogle plugin. We are not a hardware store.
We are a plumbing supply company.

It seems this plugin sent something to google to re-index our site as Hardware > Plumbing Supplies.
Our sale are now crumbling. I have removed the plugin and re-indexed our site twice already
in google webmaster tools but what good is that going to do if it re-indexing it incorrectly
to begin with?

When enabling this plugin what exactly does it send to google?

Where is the feed that i generated stored? It's not in the googleproducts table that it
created because I looked using SQL but the feed is there because the next tab lets
you modify the categories and all the products are there.

This froogle plugin has destroyed our organic traffic and reindexed our site
incorrectly. Google has absolutely no support. I emailed them 3 times with no response.
I have posted this on the google webmaster forums and no one has an answer.
They claim this plugin is a third party plugin and not the google api.

Who wrote this plugin? How can I correct this situation? What exactly did this plugin send to google?

This is a nightmare.

Greg Smyth wrote:
Hi Greg,

Froogle plugin works fine. And it DOES NOT send anything to Google until you configure it to do so.

I have several presumption why it happened:
1. You specified a URL (it's static) where your generated Froogle file is stored in Google Merchant Center. So Google periodically downloads the generated Froogle file stored on your site. I cannot find this option in Google Merchant Center right now, but I remember it was there. So you generate a new feed on your site and Google automatically downloaded it.
2.  You enabled "Automatically generate a file" in Froogle plugin. When this option is enabled, a file is automatically generate each X minutes (you can specify X value) so you don't have to manually click "Generate feed" button. The file is generated using the latest configuration ("Hardware > Plumbing Supplies" in your case). Then you uploaded the new file to Google. Do you have "Automatically generate a file" enabled?

Greg Smyth wrote:
Go to your Froogle plugin configuration page and you'll see "Generated file path (static)" field with a URL to the file (it's visible once you generated a file at least one and it's saved on the file system). It should be in the following format: "http://localhost:2619/content/files/exportimport/froogle_{some_random_number_here}.xml"

Andrei Thank you so much. I found the files and deleted them. I also uninstalled
the froogle plugin temporarily until i am really ready to use it. I understand that
the froogle plugin isn't ready to send the correct data to googles new format
from the posts i am reading. I am using  2.4 and the froogle version is 1.08.

The froogle version in 2.6 is 1.24. Does that version comply with googles new
Google Shopping data field? If so I'm thinking about upgrading to 2.6. You guys are
doing an incredible job. One thing we could really use back is support for multi
warehousing again. Any plans to put it back in?

I have removed reference from Google merchant to my site.
There were no data feeds in my gm account.
I have re-indexed my site again after making these adjustments and i will
post back here if my sales return to let you know the outcome.

Thanks again.

Greg Smyth wrote:
Yes

Greg Smyth wrote:
Yes. Please vote for this work item here

Hi Andrei,

I keep getting several errors from Google when I upload my feed.  Most of our products are shoes (apparel), so we're required to provide some additional items (gender, age group, size, color, material, pattern, & group id) for each product in the feed.  We've set up the products with Product Variants for color, then Product Varian Attributes for size.  I've also added gender & age group under Specification Attributes.  Looking at the feed that is generated it seems that none of these additional items are included.  

Is there a better way to set up our products so all of the required data is pulled into the feed?  Or is there something else I'm missing?

Thanks!

-Steve

Right. The Froogle plugin does not support these apparel attributes yet. The work item is here.
P.S. According to this post, apparel attributes are required only for US merchant.

Done. These attributes are supported now. Please see changeset 972293658b48

I'm only posting this here because i partially agree that Google's product feed requirements are getting to be ridiculous, especially in the US - and even the latest version of the Froogle plugin is only set to do a portion of what they require.

That said, can the plugin or potential content api replacement be configurable for Google's US requirements such as separate product submissions for each color variant and any of their other backwards requirements? I'm mainly trying to achieve a "Trusted Store" certification from Google and for that to happen, i need proper and complete product feed data, as well as a script running throughout the site and one on the order confirmation page.

Ultimately it would be nice to have the Trusted Stores automated script incorporated into the Froogle plugin or content api solution going forward.

*** one last note regarding default product data used for Google feeds - we should be pulling short descriptions instead of full, or at least have this configurable, because some of us use full description fields for lengthy alternative info & rich-text data when Google works best with a summary in plain text. ***

It's times like these that i wish i was a programmer, but alas I'm not and I'm hoping the experts can help us here! :-)

Hey Greg,

If you're still on these forums I am curious if your your traffic went back up after removing all data feeds/products from merchant center? We are experiencing similar trends in traffic to what you are describing after all our product were added to Google merchant center, all under one category option.

I would have to agree, be very cautious with using this plugin.

Yes our sales took off again about two weeks after deleting the Google feed as Google re-indexed the site correctly. We are now experimenting with Google product listings but I have created the feeds for that manually. I am now going to attempt to generate a Google feed in nop but I will immediately remove it from the Import/Export folder although this may not be necessary as Andrei was correct. I did enable Google merchant to upload the file from our site. I now upload the feeds manually.

Andrei was also correct in that I selected only one category Hardware/Plumbing for all the products I had generated which was at the time 4000 products. We now have 13,000.

I am going to generate a feed and then I can select and edit the the product tags into the correct categories (different feed for each group of products). We have gotten much better at this. :)

I will check in here occasionally.