Google often changes things up on us and in the process these changes affect whether our
google base feeds are accepted or rejected.
To make things more challenging, google email notification doesn't give us much information to help us sort things out.
When you have a large amount of listings, of which many are being rejected, it can be frustrating trying to figure out which items need to be corrected.
I find this method works for me:
**NOTE: because google changes things so often, my pictures may no longer be exactly what you see, but use this as a general guide and find similar.
1. If googlebase has rejected some items in your feed, you'll need to find out which items are causing the problem. To figure this out go to your google account > merchant center >
datafeeds. Click on the link to your status count, to view the Feed status summary for your feed.
This summary will show you Item Errors and Item Warnings.
Click on the plus (+) sign beside each link in the 'errors' and 'warnings' field and you will see a sample of the problems google found in your feed. Keep this window open.
2. Next, go to your cpanel/control panel or ftp and navigate to your 'feed' folder. Download a copy of your xml feed file 'yourfeed_products.xml' to your computer. Open your feed file in an html editor or text editor.
3. Go back to your google account in the Item Errors and Item Warnings section. Take note of the line number google mentions in the error message or highlight and copy one of the offending strings of text or numbers and bring that back to your text editor. In your text editor find the line number referred to in the warning or click on edit > find. The 'find' tool will open. Paste your text into the 'find what' field and click 'find all' (if available it's faster) or 'find'. The find tool will find the text or numbers you are searching for.
Go to your first found instance and see which item title is associated with the text. You can now go to your zen admin to find the title of the item you need to correct. The
quick updates mod is a useful tool to help this go faster if you have a lot of items to revise.
Search through the entire xml file for all instances of errors and warnings google has listed and get your zen cart listings cleaned up.
When you're done, generate a new xml file in your zen admin and upload it to google.
It will take a little while for the feed to show up in your account. When it shows up see how well you did at cleaning up your feed. If there are still some items that didn't get accepted, repeat the process.
©2010 My Digital Fixation
