Google Disallowed Words! A Note from the Editor. Google Base Rejects ArtFire Listings!

This is a retype from our COO Tony Ford at ArtFire Chatterbox posted this morning at 8:24am Tucson time.  This is very important for all of us to note not just for our listings, but also our blogging, our posts and other Google searchables.  


I knew this was an issue from using an awesome cdrom tool I have called "Website Promoter" I bought off of Ebay for a couple of bucks.  


Here is what Tony had to say!  


"We received an email from Google base this morning that some of the  feeds from ArtFire.com have been temporarily removed.  This is because some of the items on ArtFire had "excessive capitalization". 

Google requires items to be grammatically correct with proper title capitalization.  Those folks using all caps to try to make their titles more attention grabbing may now have zero products in google base.  We see this kind of title on other venues quite often. 

The difference is that we will be auto-altering your titles to adjust to this guideline and sharing the information with you.   If you are using all caps on ArtFire.com you can start by changing those titles.  If you are using them on other venues with Google base, you should consider changing them there as well. 

We do not know how many accounts are affected at this point.   It is a good idea to use proper grammar on your titles and descriptions. 

This also suggests that Google Base (shopping) will continue to develop more sophisticated filters in the future.  For this reason it is important that you follow guidelines and not try to use hyphens or misspellings to try to work around prohibited terms. (wine spelled wi-ne or whine) for example.

In this case, it appears to be only some accounts that were inactivated, but google can and does ban entire websites permanently from google base for repeat violations.  That means that one or two sellers who attempt to "fool" google can cause all sellers items to be removed from google shopping. 

Thank you for your attention to this issue. We have already made the adjustment to auto-correct new items before submitting them to google.  

Here is the email we received from google:

"Thank you for submitting your products to the Google Merchant Center.

We've recently reviewed your items and noticed they contain errors.

Because of these errors, we've temporarily removed your items from the search results. Please correct the following problems with your items:

Issues:

- Excessive capitalization

-----------------

- Excessive capitalization: Some of your items' titles contain excessive capitalization. Please use standard spelling and grammar, and avoid all unnecessary use of capitalization. Please visit

http://google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160057to ensure your items comply with our Editorial Guidelines.

After you've corrected the errors, please upload your items again. If you're using the scheduling feature to submit your feed, we recommend that you upload the corrected feed manually before your next scheduled upload.

In addition, please know that your items are automatically re-evaluated.

Therefore, you do not need to reply to this email confirming that you've resubmitted your feed. We'll notify you if any additional corrections are needed. If you have any questions, please visit our Help Center to find answers to frequently asked questions.

Sincerely,

The Google Team"

This is extremely important as sites that are repeat offenders are permanently blocked from Google! If we don't change this phenomenon then we could all loose out.  If you see a listing on ArtFire that has some illegal spellings...such as "wine" or "free" or are misspelled, you can message the artisan and refer them to the forum or this blog.   If you are an Etsy seller, make sure you check those listings also.  Capital letters seem to catch attention, but in reality, all it does is get you kicked off of Google base. 

Disallowed Words

Special thanks to Popniculture an Artisan from ArtFire who wrote up disallowed words and pricing mistakes for you.

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