Saturday, May 1, 2010

Google Base Lessons

I have been off Google Base for the past month now, and my visitors have plumetted. Because I have had few visitors, my Organic rankings have dropped. These 2 are definately tied together, for obvious reasons.

I was off Google Base for 2 reasons. One, was that I was rebuilding much of my website, so not point in being online. The other, even more important, is that I could not get my stuff listed. Here were the 2 causes, and solutions.

Problem: Google said I had not claimed my website domain, even though I swore I did... over and over again.

Solution: Verifying and Claiming are 2 different things. You need to Verify from Webmaster Tools, then Claim it from Google Base. When done properly, your Google Base Settings - General - Website URL will be checked as Verified and Claimed.

Problem: It kept saying Invalid Attribute for my Payment_Accepted option.

Solution: The wording in Google's help file, is not entirely clear. Do not add any spaces between the comas. Like cash,mastercard,visa,discover is correct. My real problem, seemed to be in Excel, however. I save as Tab Delimited, but the damn thing would put quotes around just that block of text. I could not see it from excel, but once I opened in a text editor, I could see them.

Once I made the 2 changes above, it accepted my feed without complaint.

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