Google Shopping - Google Merchant Centre

Hi

I am just starting out with nopcommerce and playing around with the promotion providers feature. I notice that the feed for google is very thin and is for google base, not merchant centre. I recently changed shop products but had discovered that google base was becoming obsolete and has been replaced with google merchant centre for getting your products into the shopping section of google.

I learned this the hard way after submitting unique products yet they would never make it into the pages. I discovered that google recommend attributes such as category, style, colour etc which carry more weight in ranking than keywords. I painstakingly added these to my xml feeds and surprise surpise my products were on page one top five every time.

Is there anyway in nopcommerce of adding these into the xml feed in bulk or any recommended tools or scripts that anyone is using to manually edit the xml file?

I have given a sample below of what I need to get into the xml feed below. Also is there anyway to alter the submission from google base to google merchant centre. I understand that feeds added to google base are moved into merchant centre within 7 days but in my experience so far it doesnt happen at all and a manual upload to merchant centre is required.

<item>
         <title>my item</title>
         <description>my item description</description>
         <link>http://mystore.co.uk/shop/article_1-002/myitem.html?pse=coa</link>
         <g:image_link>http://mystore.co.uk/.media/542517130778.jpeg</g:image_link>
         <guid>4-282</guid>
         <g:price>10.99</g:price>
         <g:condition>new</g:condition>
         <g:product_type>Home &amp; Garden &gt</g:product_type>
          <g:colour>red</g:colour>
          <g:colour>black</g:colour>
          <g:style>contemporary</g:style
      </item>

I forgot to mention also. Many people shop exclusively using google images. To get indexed in google images the image name should contain the keywords along with other things like alt text etc.

Is there any way to rename the images in nopcommerce to meaningful names without breaking it or has anyone found a succesful way of getting listed?

vote here


http://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/workitem/9859

related topic
enable image file names for seo and ease of use

Excellent news. Voted yes on both counts. Please vote guys as the lack of these two features in my previous shop product were the cause of my business failing first time around.  Read more about merchant centre at "http://www.google.com/support/merchants/?hl=en_US" and follow the links for your region. Organic search as you all now is very competitive but I dont think merchant centre is anywhere near as difficult at all provided you submit the right feeds. My previous host did not even know it existed.  From my experience merchant centre ranking is driven by attributes in favour of traditional keywords which have lesser value and no value at all when not used in conjunction with attributes. . From google:

"Include relevant and complete information about your products with attributes."
"Avoid gimmicky repetition. You may not post excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords"

"We've created a new website, the Google Merchant Center, where you can upload your product feeds and make them easy to find on Google Product Search.

If you have been uploading Products through Google Base, your data feeds and account settings have been migrated to the new Merchant Center.

You can still upload non-product data to Google Base. Use either a data feed or the API and help people find your items when they search."

As I stated previously, my items in google base did not make it to merchant centre (no attributes) and therefore did not list in page results dynmamicly as stated in the above

For information, well constructed items listed on ebay rank excellently on google shopping. I  suspect this is because the google model, category, colour, stlye etc mirrors the merchant centre attributes identically. I am using ebay to tick my business over until I get sorted with nopcommerce but who wants to pay all those fees:-(