What is Google Base?

Setting up a Google Base account is the first step you must take to have your items for sale to be shown in Google Products. What exactly is Google Base? Let’s explore that a bit is easy terms.

First here is the link to set up your Google Base account.  When you load your products and you will do this in a very special syntax your products will then have the opportunity to be shown on Google Products pages as well as in the organic results under a listing called Shopping.

Sometimes a pay per click customer will see a competitors item shown with an image in the organic results and think that this is an AdWords vehicle and that if they set up AdWords image ads there images of products will show in the organic results of Google.com, this is not the case. Google Base is unique and another free search vehicle and is not associated with participation in Google AdWords, although Google AdWords text ads may show on the Google Products shopping page but only as text ads.

You can submit your product listing to Google Base as either a tab delimited text spreadsheet or as an XML data feed. I personally like the XML data feed. For more information on the specifics of how to do this and the format, please visit this Google Base information page on data feeds.

Once your feed is created, you will load the feed using FTP to a special location that Google provides. After that it is up to Google if they will show your products, images, pricing and information when it matches a search.

For e-commerce sellers Google Base provides another great way to showcase your products using Google.