Optimizing for Froogle Search Engine - Froogle Optimization

Article revised 2004 November 22, Monday | Originally posted 2003 March 31, Monday
by Gord Collins - Bay Street Search Engine Optimization | Toronto, Ontario | Canada

The Froogle™ search engine (http://froogle.google.com/) by Google is now two years old and has been introduced in Britain and Germany. This service started with some potential yet Google has not promoted it properly and its use has suffered. A visit to the site will show you that what this search interface does is emulate eBay and it doesn't do it very well.

Despite that, it does see a healthy amount of consumer traffic and there are techniques that you can use to position your products for good Froogle rankings. For sellers of popular consumer products, it is worth submitting a feed if your web site is well optimized. If you're interested in having your site optimized, consider hiring a capable SEO consultant.

Google could be promoting Froogle better and that would create more grassroots support which is what Google thrives on.

What's Wrong with Froogle?

A lack of promotion is the key reason but there are other issues. The original Froogle had a product category directory and it helped orient visiting consumers to what they believed was a type of catalogue. Consumers need a starting point of reference when searching. Think of shopping at Wal-Mart, where you enter the store and you know where everything is. You can go to the electronics section and find what you're looking for. The Froogle team inspired by eBay's success decided that all searchers need is a search box whose only functionality was sorting by price.

Now that sounds like its good for consumers, but here's what happens...

Visitors get pushed into shopping only on price. That's forced Froogle merchants/optimizers to resort to dividing their products up into the smallest unit possible so they can present the lowest price. For example, a sports supplement retailer has to try to sell or at least present individual protein bars rather than selling a box of 10 bars. This is number one tactic if you want to use it, but who would want to be forced to sell and ship one protein bar?

Merchants get forced into price based competition and selling loss leaders like there's no tomorrow. The result is discouraged merchants and consumers get the run around.

There is no sorting by key features whereby sellers can communicate their value offer to consumers. If you're selling plasma televisions, you'll be lumped in with everyone and only the lowest priced plasma TV is going to be seen.

The search features of Froogle, are becoming a little more advanced so it does take some optimization and online merchandising to know how to capture potential buyers from this search engine. You may have to develop a product pricing strategy to get listed, but you should also use effective customer conversion techniques. Quality optimization is the key factor in gaining initial rankings, however you still have to use effective e-merchandising to get the sale.

Froogle has some advantages over other shopping search engines such as Dealtime, Yahoo, Nextag or Bizrate. For one thing, it's free so more merchants will have their products listed. It also means more competition. That's good for the consumer and may Froogle more useful. Froogle doesn't have a lot of add on services and features. It's very simple. The other shopping search engines operate on a pay per click model and will do more to help the merchant make a sale. With visitors flipping back and forth between pages and sites during their shopping, PPC can be an expensive proposition.

Froogle was groundbreaking because it was one of the first product search engines to give consumers (B2C) and B2B buyers to find the very lowest prices and other key product features. Manufacturers too, can bypass intermediaries to cut costs and gain direct access to consumers.

As with all other Google search results, Froogle ranks store sites based only on their relevance to the search terms you've entered. So to optimize for Froogle, you should understand Google's complex algorithm. Don't have the time or inclination? That's what the pros are for.

The Froogle search engine has its own URI submission process which is explained below. It also filters the regular Google database for pages with relevant product related material. Therefore, any appropriate page could be indexed.

Froogle Directory - 15 Product Categories

Apparel and Accessories - Jewelry, Men's, Women's
Arts and Entertainment - Art, Collectibles, Crafts and Hobbies
Auto and Vehicles - Auto Accessories, Boats and Marine
Baby - Nursing and Feeding, Strollers
Books, Music and Video - Books, Music, Video
Business and Industry - Construction, Science and Technology
Computers - Notebooks, PDAs, Software
Electronics - Audio, Cameras, TV and Video
Flowers - Arrangements, Roses
Food and Gourmet - Beverages, Food, Gift Baskets
Health and Personal Care - Fragrance, Makeup, Skin Care
Home and Garden - Home Furnishings, Kitchen, Pets
Office - Office Equipment, Office Supplies
Sports and Outdoors - Cycling, Golf, Team Sports
Toys and Games - Dolls, Games, Video Games

Searchers can search in the above individual categories and view the products by price range. There is an advanced search page where you can specify words in the product name and you can use a list or grid view of search results.

Froogle Shopping List

Froogle is now offering a shopping list. Shoppers can create a list of products, and even a wish list which friends and family can view if they know their email address. However, you must have a Google account to use the shopping list feature.

Information for Froogle Merchants

To apply for a Froogle merchant account you must go to:

https://www.google.com/froogle/merchants/apply

Froogle will evaluate your application and send you instructions on how to create a product feed document and upload this text file to their server. The product feed is basically your catalogue in a spreadsheet.

Before you apply you should note that Froogle does not accept the following types of products and/or services:

Auction items, unless they have a 'Buy It Now' price that remains fixed throughout an auction
Services and memberships
Travel tickets, such as airline tickets or train tickets
Vacation packages, including cruises and hotel reservations
Illegal products
Products that have service agreements attached
Customizable products that do not have a fixed price
Real estate and property
Free products

The Froogle Data Feed

The feed document is a tab delimited text file. The first line are the names of the product information fields. These field names in the example below are for a book. Your product may have additional fields that you'll have to ensure are in place. You can submit one product feed for each grouping of products or you could put them all on one spreadsheet. Whatever is manageable for you is the best choice. If you're tracking sales, you should match the product groupings accordingly or use an advanced spreadsheet analysis program to extract the appropriate data when drilling down for specific sales performance of product types or lines.

product_url name description price image_url category offer_id instock shipping
product_type currency brand upc manufacturer exp_date
isbn format author publisher pages

You can list one product per line but each product must be unique. Don't try to insert one line per color of your product. You can have only one line if the product line only varies in color. Pricing, descriptions and linking must not be deceptive.

Use your targeted keywords in your product fields in the feed document. Don't use marketese or brand names unless they are related to the keywords the searcher will use. Froogle is very literal. If your feed document uses the wrong wording, it will negatively affect your ranking.

How to Optimize for Froogle

Froogle appears to use indexing very similar to Google's algorithm, yet PageRank™ plays a smaller role. That's because products are often listed on dynamically generated pages, or at least in frequently changing pages. And it's also due to the fact that Froogle is attempting to display specific products and not a web site. The context and scope of the search is narrower than a regular Google search. The Froogle algorithm looks at specific parts of your feed document and your web page to determine relevancy. The product name and description are very important both in your feed and on the page. You may want to vary the length of the description in your feed. That way you can test whether a greater keyword density makes a difference to your ranking.

Google's use of latent semantic indexing adds a new challenge as does authority-based link analysis. LSI attempts to understand the query by using related keywords and by broadening the search terms. It also analyzes themes on the web pages. Therefore, you may want to write your product pages according to keyword themes just as you would in optimizing a regular web page.

Authority based link analysis values links from other pages that are on popular high ranking sites on the same keyword theme or topic. Using synonyms and words with the same stem (e.g., players, playing, plays, played, replay) and other words that tend to appear in web pages with that keyword (e.g., dvd, cd, discs, players, movies). You can't load up your product descriptions with all of these keywords of course, but do choose what you believe the most keyword relevant. Try to think like a robot!

Many product pages are dynamically generated and therefore are lacking PageRank and link reputation. You may want to create links from your home page and other product pages directly to the specific product page. Some retailers take a packaged product and list contents individually. You don't have to have one product per page. In fact, if you do manage to have a page rank highly for a particular product, having all the information and accessories relevant to that product on that page, means the customer won't be flipping back and forth between pages. Generally, flipping pages results in less sales conversion. Getting the right combination of products and information into a page is a key strategy choice when optimizing for Froogle.

Froogle, like Google, uses exact keyword matches. However, when searchers use a plural word, Froogle will highlight singular variants with the pages listed in its directory. The words are semantically similar so the search results will have some similarities. Because Froogle is still in beta testing, and to improve search results now, they treat singular and plural as the same.

Title tags (<title></title> elements) are important, so you want variations of your keyword phrases in them. If you sell mp3 players, you might use...

<title>MP3 Player Portable Rio Sony MP3 Players Best Car MP3 Player</title>

This repetition is okay, but don't repeat any keyword more than two times. If you sell brand name products, then you should have those brand names in the title tag too. If there are obvious product features such as "hdtv compatible" then put it in. You must be obvious in optimization.

In your body copy you want the same words to show up, some in headings and others in the copy...

<h1>MP3 Players</h1>

<h2>View our complete range of the latest MP3 players</h2>

<p><strong>Portable MP3 Players</strong> Rio MP3 Player</p>

<p>MSRP Price $109.95 Our Price: $99.95 You Save $10.00<br> 128MB MP3 Player/Recorder<br> Whiplash recordable MP3 technology allows you to feed from any audio device such as a portable CD player.</p>

<p>Sony MP3 players</p>

<p>MSRP Price $109.95 | Our Price: $99.95 | You Save: $10.00</p>

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Developing and Linking Pages for Ranking Support

Good interlinking between your listed product pages will give your rankings a big boost. The trick is in knowing how to link them and how to match them to any inbound links from other web sites. Since Froogle will de-emphasize duplicated pages, you want to make your pages are unique. For top performance on a catalogue type site with thousands of pages, you will have to examine the structure of your page templates and includes. There's no replacement for upfront strategic planning on large sites. The performance difference will be exceptional.

If your individual product pages don't have PageRank, then Froogle may attribute the PageRank of the folder or directory level it's in. That is why strong sites like Buy.com, eBay, Wal-Mart, IBM and OfficeMax can dominate listings. Because of this, ensure your product pages are in a folder with high PageRank.

If your site is an underdog and you have a certain range core group of products that are important, it is best to link to these product pages directly from the home page. This way you have the maximum amount of PageRank being passed to them. And, you should have links on other web pages leading to that particular product page. For instance, if you sell DVD players, have a topical page that discusses DVD players and then link to your targeted product page.

Listing Copy

Keep your pricing and product information close together on the page to make it easy for Froogle to index them.

Take a look at the top ranking pages that are listed for your specific products and take note of how they are structured. Read the Froogle data feed document carefully and match your product info (using keywords) with the field criteria they list in the data feed document. Build PageRank and link reputation as you normally would.

For large commercial accounts, it is wise to hire an SEO professional. For overall value, few marketing efforts can surpass search engine optimization and the Froogle search engine promises to make it more so.

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