Friday, February 22, 2019
People come to Google to discover new brands and products throughout their shopping journey. On Search and Google Images, shoppers are provided with rich snippets like product description, ratings, and price to help guide purchase decisions.
Connecting potential customers with up-to-date and accurate product information is key to successful shopping journeys on Google, so today, we're introducing new ways for merchants to provide this information to improve results for shoppers.
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Search Console
Many retailers and brands add structured data markup to their websites to ensure Google understands the products they sell. A new report for 'Products' is now available in Search Console for sites that use schema.org structured data markup to annotate product information. The report allows you to see any pending issues for markup on your site. Once an issue is fixed, you can use the report to validate if your issues were resolved by re-crawling your affected pages. Learn more about the rich result status reports
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Merchant Center
While structured data markup helps Google properly display your product information when we crawl your site, we are expanding capabilities for all retailers to directly provide up-to-date product information to Google in real-time. Product data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Center will now be eligible for display in results on surfaces like Search and Google Images. This product information will be ranked based only on relevance to users' queries, and no payment is required or accepted for eligibility. We're starting with the expansion in the US, and support for other countries will be announced later in the year.
Get started
You don't need a Google Ads campaign to participate. If you don't have an existing account and sell your products in the US, create a Merchant Center account and upload a product data feed.
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Manufacturer Center
We're also rolling out new features to improve your brand's visibility and help customers find your products on Google by providing authoritative and up-to-date product information through Google Manufacturer Center. This information includes product description, variants, and rich content, such as high-quality images and videos that can show on the product's knowledge panel.
These solutions give you multiple options to better reach and inform potential customers about your products as they shop across Google.
If you have any questions, be sure to post in our forum.