Share your product data with Google

To increase eligibility for
richer appearances and on more surfaces across Google
that can bring more relevant traffic to your site, share your ecommerce product data with
Google. To take advantage of these benefits, Google recommends that you do the following:

• Include structured data in your site’s product pages.
  Learn more about the benefits of
  adding structured data to your web pages.
• Tell Google directly which products you want to show on Google
  by uploading a feed to
  Google Merchant Center.
  Google Merchant Center is a Google service that has a deeper understanding of commerce data.
  Learn more about the benefits of Google Merchant Center.

Add product structured data to web pages

Where feasible, add structured data to your product pages. While structured data isn’t
required to appear in Google Search results, it can help Google understand your page better
and display it as a rich result. For example:

• Structured data increases eligibility for
  Product rich results.
• Structured data can improve the accuracy of Google’s understanding of content such as price,
  discount, and shipping costs on a page (this can also help the accuracy of Google Merchant
  Center verification of product feeds against your site).

Ready to start implementing? Check out
Include structured data relevant to ecommerce
for more information.

Google may at times use other approaches to extract data from pages. If you want to explicitly
tell Google not to use content on a page to form a snippet, add a
data-nosnippet attribute
to that HTML element.

Upload data to Google Merchant Center

While uploading product data to Google Merchant Center isn’t mandatory to appear in Google
search results, it can enhance Google’s understanding of your products. Participation in Google
Merchant Center is mandatory for some Google surfaces, such as listings in the
Google Shopping tab.

For smaller sites that are updated less frequently, you can use an
automated feed to build your product data
from crawled web content (structured data can help improve the accuracy of data extraction).
This approach can also be useful to get started with less effort.

For larger sites or sites with frequently changing content, periodically
upload new data feed files
to Google Merchant Center (or for immediate updates use the
Content API).
This gives you greater control over your data in Google. Benefits of uploading feed files include:

• Increase confidence Google knows all of your products.
  Web crawling is not guaranteed to find all products on your site.
• Gain greater control over the timing of updates.
  Google does not guarantee how long it takes before changes on your site will be processed through crawling. Feeds
  can be used for weekly, daily, or even hourly updates, at your time of choice. The Content
  API allows immediate content updates, which is particularly useful for stock level updates.
• Share data that’s not present on your website.
  You may decide some information is not appropriate to include on your web site, such as
  physical store level inventory data. Feeds and the Content API let you share this data with
  Google without it being present on your website.

Learn more about how to
Sign up for Google Merchant Center.

How Google uses structured data and Google Merchant Center data

The following are examples of how Google uses structured data embedded in web pages and Google Merchant Center data
for different experiences. Note that experiences may vary by country, device, and other
factors.

Resolving update delay issues

When Google combines data from your website and Google Merchant Center feeds, it can lead to
data inconsistency issues due to lag. For example, if a product sells out, your website would
typically immediately mark it as unavailable for purchase, but Google Merchant
Center may not be updated until some time later, especially if you’re using feeds.

To avoid this potential conflict in pricing and stock availability data (a common cause of
synchronization issues), tell Google Merchant Center
to automatically update its copy of your product data
based on the website contents, when such a discrepancy is noticed.

To learn more about how Googlebot and Google Merchant Center work together, see
How to get your products into Search
from the Search Central Lightning talk series.