Editor’s Note: Rookie returns with an interesting look at Google’s "Froogle" product search facility, and provides a compelling strategy to use it to your advantage as a way of driving traffic to your adult site. Check it out! ~ Stephen
I searched for the most unlikely topic in Froogle: "gay porn sites" and what I found were hundreds of listings for sites belonging to MAXIMUM CASH. Check out the first page, sites 4 thru 10, just for starters: MAX CASH rapes FROOGLE. Every page has a listing by MAX CASH! But beware before you click on any of the images as they are pop-up hell courtesy of MC. So what does this infiltration tell us about Froogle?
Obviously the Froogle folks aren't reviewing much of anything if these guys can disguise a gay porn site as a tangible product! And further evidence the Froogle folks are lax on checking these site submissions: the submissions are loaded with relentless pop-ups – no editor would approve pop-up hell! Bear in mind, it is possible MAX CASH added the pop-up links after the sites were listed; oh, how clever of MAX! It all looks fairly simple: just disguise your Web site as a magazine, and submit it. Then after the site is listed, change a couple of links, and your porn site will be taking advantage of Google's little sister, Froogle.
So here's the poop and nothing but the poop on FROOGLE. Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase. It is located at https://www.froogle.com.
The Froogle Engine itself is organized into Categories. There are 14 categories. Shoppers can either drill-down on any of them, or search directly by keyword. Shoppers can also limit their search to a specific category.
Search results are limited to one product per store. Each result displays a thumbnail image of the product to the left, with the product's name, price and description listed to the right of the image. The store where the product is available is also listed, along with a link to see all results related to your keyword that are available at that particular merchant.
Froogle's emphasis is on helping users find products, rather than providing product information, reviews, and other associated information found on other shopping search services. What does this mean to you? As an extension of the Google search engine that millions of people around the globe use daily to research products before they purchase, listing your product in Froogle is a free way to extend the reach of your marketing efforts to millions of customers!
There are two ways you can get included in Froogle: The first, though not the most effective is to let Google or Froogle crawl your site and pick up the information for itself. This is likely to result in inaccuracies in your product listing. The second, and more effective way is to submit a data feed directly to Froogle.
In Part 2, we’ll take a look at how to setup and submit your product data feed to Froogle…