As Barry Schwartz over at SEORoundtable pointed out last week, Google seems to be moving around product search results on Google.com. I’ve noticed this more and more over the last week.
Here’s a search for ‘red sweater’:
I hope this is just a test. I find this extremely confusing compared to the normal OneBox placement at the top of the search engine results page:
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Of course you prefer to have the OneBox placement at the top; that means you’re number 1. Google is always testing and if they are always trying to figure out which layout search users respond most favorably toward.
Actually, I disagree, I don’t see why Google Shopping results should be listed as if they had pagerank 10.
[...] Background: Google Merchant Center recently replaced Google Base, the place where merchants submit and manage their product data feeds. There is some new functionality in the Google Merchant Center compared to Google Base, but the core function of the Google Merchant Center feed is still to manage products listings on Google Product Search, Google’s shopping search engine. Merchants know Google Product Search as a significant source of free traffic, partly because of the powerful product OneBox results. [...]
Hi Brian, I am trying to figure out how Google merchant center really works. We submit feeds daily, we use the Google shipping script for UPS (both through the merchant center and our site), we have limited the product names to Googles standards, we have been an online retailer since 2006. yet we are not ranking, we do not show up for most searches and all I see featured by Google are, Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, Target, Buy.com, etc. It seems the small players are not getting a fare share through the new Google Merchant center / ex Google base submissions.
Any thoughts?