Froogle datafeed for subproduct url

[kbalkcum]

I just setup my Froogle datafeed using API and it works. However, over 90% of the product url's have defaulted to my homepage url. One person suggested it had something to do Froogle handling subproducts that way. This would make sense except some of the url's for subproducts did transfer in the Froogle datafeed. Any suggestions? I am upgrading to version 8.3 and am going to try the FTP datafeed next.

[Jim]

When you configure the "Product URL (Landing Page):" for Froogle under Merchandising > Google > Froogle > Configure you can set it to one of 3 locations. The same setting will be used for all products in the store. The 3 options are "A page the product is assigned to", "Moreinfo page", "Search Destination".

In most cases a subproduct would not be assigned to a page by itself but it would be assigned to another product. So if you have the first option selected there is no page that the subproduct is assigned to. So ShopSite will use the home page of the store and append a pound sign (#) and the product record number to the home page url. (Google requires a unique url for each product so this makes it unique).

Quite often subproducts also do not have Moreinfo pages or Search Destination pages so the same type of URL would be generated for the product in these situations.

In short Google is not really setup to handle subproducts, they want individual standalone items. To get around that issue if you are using subproducts you should make sure that the subproduct by itself is assigned to a page, or that it has a MoreInformation page or has a specific Search Destiination specified. Then you should select the appropriate "Product URL (Landing Page):" on the Froogle configuration screen.

The other option is to include enough information in the parent product that the subproducts can be found and then exclude subproducts from the Froogle/Googlebase feed.

[kbalkcum]

I did select the option to use the MoreInfo page as the url which is why at least a few of the subproducts' url's carried over. I just can't figure out why so many did not.

[Jim]

Do the ones that don't show up have the MoreInformation page generated?

[kbalkcum]

Yes, which is what makes this so confusing. I cannot see any difference between the ones that default to the home page url and the ones that go to their own page. In fact, many of each are on the same product page.