Product feeds
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A product feed is a file containing information about the products listed on your site. Product feeds are used by e-commerce companies to provide information about products in an online store to search engines, product comparison websites, and other similar aggregators of e-commerce information. By sending product feeds regularly you can make sure these sites display the latest pricing, promotional, or other information for your products.
[edit] Feed formats
- Google base supports tab-delimited text format and various XML formats including RSS1.0, RSS2.0, and Atom feed format.
- Other product listing sites use proprietary formats that are either plain text or XML format.
- Emerging RDF format: Semantic web standards such as RDF are taking root. It is expected product feed will soon adopt this new web standard.
[edit] Submitting a data feed
- Many shopping comparison sites accept product data feeds.
- Some examples of these companies: Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Google Base
- Submitting pages to the shopping engines is done through a data feed.
- A feed is a structured, automated text file with detailed specifications dictated by each shopping comparison engine.
- Once a feed is submitted to a shopping engine, pages are guaranteed to appear within the site's index of Web pages, but they are not guaranteed a specific ranking within the search results.
- Rankings are based on the specific engine's algorithm for judging the relevance of a given product to a given keyword search.
