Google seems to think you can post just about anything into Google base. They list the following on their site:
Examples of popular item types:
Examples of other interesting item types:
Thanks to David Brown, I now have a demo video available on the site. Just use the “What is Onebox” link to the right, or use this link to go to the OneBox Demo video. Hopefully, anyone that has been wondering what this is all about will find the video useful.
A question I recently received via instant messaging:
I noticed that Google Base lets you change listing right in the interface. If that’s the case, why would someone need to resend their feed?
While it’s true that you can keep editing products and keep them on the site, I don’t personally have time to edit our 9,000 listings by hand to keep them active. Why did I say KEEP them active? Because of the following statement on base:
While doing some research last week, I came across some rather interesting information about base feeds appearing in the OneBox. You can view it here.
Google – Items may appear on Google under the following conditions:
I’ve had a few people question if we really did $1M in sales from a Google Base feed. Yes, we did indeed get over $1M in sales from our Base feed in 2006. What might be even more impressive is that Base resulted in over 100,000 visitors during that same timespan to one site, and those converted to sales at above a 5% rate. In the power tool industry, that’s pretty high. I don’t have those same figures easily attainable for the other site, though.
When you’ve got your onebox optimization down to a science, you’ll of course be sending out automated feeds every day with every product on your site included. But that’s the end result, not the means of getting there.
Brian Mark is a forum regular around the web and a speaker at Search Engine Strategies. He has worked at ToolBarn.com since 1999, taking the online retailer of power tools from a few orders per week to an Internet Retailer Top 500 company.
