About Froogle

Froogle is a separate index in Google that lists commercial merchant sites that provide products for sale. Listing your products on Froogle is a free way to extend the reach of your marketing efforts. Froogle only lists products with set prices - it excludes services and affiliate products for now.

Each one of your products needs a separate listing in Froogle.
Similar to Google Search, relevancy to the search query will be important to good Froogle ranking. For more info, see http://froogle.google.com/froogle/about.html

A Froogle product listing has the following minimum components:

Product Title. Write a title using the techniques you would use for a Web page on Google. Keep it concise and include the most important keywords earliest in the title. Since the foundation of Froogle is specific product search, include a specific product make and model number in the title if applicable. Consumers that are price comparison-shopping are likely to include this information in their search query

Product Description. Create a compelling keyword-rich description of about 25 words. This improves the chances of Froogle using your supplied description rather than “scraping” one from a different location.

Product Photo. Froogle has a place to the left of a listing for a product photo. A user is less likely to click on a listing that does not include a photo as it looks unprofessional and sloppy compared to other listings that do. You may need to create specific product images on your server just for Froogle as they need to be a specific size.

Product Price. A product price must be included. If you have multiple prices for a product (regular, special, after rebate) place the current price you want displayed. Froogle will not display multiple prices. You can update your product information daily, weekly or monthly.

Product URL. Like Google, product Web pages that are closest to the root folder of the server are believed to score better with Froogle.


Using a Data Feed
When your product Web pages are indexed by Google, your products should automatically be included in the Froogle index if they meet Froogle guidelines. However this is not the ideal way for your products to be listed on Froogle.

Instead, you should create submit a Froogle data feed, which is a tab-delimited text file. A data feed file can be submitted to Froogle daily, weekly or monthly as best fits your product updates and price changes. The data feed file is uploaded via FTP to hedwig.google.com.

Submitting a data feed is by far the most efficient method of listing your products in Froogle. For specific information on creating a Froogle data feed, see
http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html

Here is the actual data feed I use for the Google SEO Secrets book on Froogle. Note that an actual data feed can have more fields than this (product ID, color, size, etc):
product_url name description price image_url
http://www.google-secrets.com/ Google SEO Secrets - How to Get a Top Ranking The complete guide to search engine optimization and linking strategies for the Google search engine. A must-have ebook for Webmasters and Internet marketers alike. Order now. 97.00 http://www.google-secrets.com/froogle1.jpg

Although hard to tell, my feed is comprised of 5 tabbed columns - URL, title, description, price, and URL to product photo.

Submission of data feeds gives you time-sensitive control over product changes and accuracy rather than waiting for regular Google updates. Data feeds must be submitted at least once a month to avoid automatic expiration in the Froogle index. I have had this happen to me so make sure you submit once a month.
Submitting data feeds can be a time-consuming. There is a great tool available, Froogle Feeder, that helps automate product additions, deletions, and product conversions to data feed format and will submit your feed to your Froogle account.

For more information on Froogle Feeder, see http://www.siteall.com/. This site also contains a wealth of information about Froogle.