Google_base Issues

[Tonytank]

Hi,

I work for a website that supplies PAT Testing equipment and supplies. We have a Google_base feed that shows roughly 700 items in Google shopping. Are ad words at the moment are something of a mess so for the moment it works well for us.

However last week are feed (which updates every morning at 2 am) went from 700 some odd items to just 124 items. I spoke to someone at Google and they said it is most likely a problem with our feed, how ever I not any of the staff here have done anything to change it.

I'm starting to feel a tiny bit out of my depth here and I am hoping some one here might be able to help or at least point me in the direction of somewhere or someone who can help. Our website uses Opencart.

Apologies in advance if this wasn't the correct area to post this.

Kind regards,

Tonytank

 

[Redrum]

Have you actually checked the feed to see how many products are in it? Have you looked in your Google account to see when they last processed the feed and whether they reported any errors?

There are various reasons for them rejecting products. It's impossible to say why without more information. I wouldn't bother speaking to Google. They're unlikely to help unless you have a mega PPC budget, but the specifications and minimum requirements for their feed are on their website.

 

[Tonytank]

I've checked the feed through Google and whilst there are some issues and errors it strikes me as odd that day after day we have had no issue with inserting 700 odd items each time and then suddenly last week we are down to 124.

The feed is processed everyday at 2 am, I can also manually process it. When it used to work properly some products where rejected but the majority still appeared fine. Now something has changed and dropped the amount of products in the feed dramatically.

 

[AJK]

Google does change its algorithms and error handling from time to time. Something that throws a warning or error one day might still show up in search, but disappear a week later. When you say "there are some issues and errors" - do you think fixing these would solve the problem?

(I haven't maintained a Base/Products feed for a while so won't claim to be particularly current!)

 

[Redrum]

Have you looked at the feed itself, not in Google, but the file you're actually sending? Are all the products in there?

If they are, then Google must be rejecting some of them. Without us seeing the feed, we can't say why, so you need to go through the specification and see what you've got wrong.

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en-GB

The most common one is missing some of the required identifiers. You need at least 2 of the 3 for each product (barcode, brand and manufacturers part number). A decent ecommere platform shouldn't include products that don't meet this requirement because doing so can get your whole feed banned.

 

[Tonytank]

When I look at the feed it is REALLY hard to tell what is normal and what isn't.

I have just logged into google and under feed level messages it says...

"XML formatting error - Error
Our system encountered an error when processing your data feed. Learn more.
Examples:
Line Nr. Column Nr.
13,671 145"

That has to be a good starting point right? Now how do I get to line 13,671, column 145?

 

[Redrum]

It sounds like you're using the XML version of the feed which isn't quite so easy to read yourself. If you use the tab-delimited one you can open it in Excel or Open Office and read the data very easily.

But they've told you exactly where the problem lies so you just need to open the file you're submitting in a text editor that shows line and column numbers, and then have a look at the line and column where they say there is a problem. I assume you're using Windows. I think Wordpad might show line numbers, but if not, you can download something like Notepad++ or Geany.

I've never used Google product feeds in an XML format but I'm guessing that when you do and they find a "XML formatting error", they don't go any further with the file, so this one problem might be why hundreds of your products are missing.

My guess is you've got a character that is not valid in XML without being encoded, such as an &.

 

[Tonytank]

Thanks for your help so far guys.

I have opened the xml file in notepad++ and its a little clearer but it still feels like a needle in a stack of needles time.

 

[Tonytank]

Fixed it!

It was more or less exactly what you said it would be. Very fixable and noted for future clashes.

Thanks guys.