Google Base

August 15th, 2006

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which Google will make searchable on their website. More info about Google Base here. It is a useful tool to use along side normal SERPs results as you can add products, services and other data which is searchable. This is also a good way to get some quality inbound links from a very highly ranked site.

Using Google Base is an easy, straight forward process as long as you have your products or whatever you want to upload pre stored in a database or tabbed document. Google provide some templates that can be used to structure your databases but certain fields are obligitory so some fiddling may have to be done to your databases. You can upload one item at a time or bulk items in tab-delimited format and RSS formats. Once uploaded google will then automatically produce a page for each item that includes all the data from your database and publish them. Here is an example of this generated page.

Although Google Base is very simple to use, there seems to be a bug in the site where you can not update an already uploaded file. For example if you upload a file with the wrong field names you will have to completely delete the file and upload it again under a different file name. Hopefully these errors will be ironed out with the next releases.