Google Shopping - Froogle has Returned

Google has decided to revert back to free Google Shopping, to assist small business stay open, in the wake of CORVID-19, Coronavirus pandemic. With most retail and fun shopping at a standstill and close by the government order, digital is the way to go.
Details sourced directly from Google.

"It’s now free to sell on Google"

Bill Ready headshot
Bill Ready
President, Commerce
Published Apr 21, 2020

The retail sector has faced many threats over the years, which have only intensified during the coronavirus pandemic. With physical stores shuttered, digital commerce has become a lifeline for retailers. And as consumers increasingly shop online, they're searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods. While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale.

In light of these challenges, we’re advancing our plans to make it free for merchants to sell on Google. Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google. With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship but are less discoverable online.

For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings. If you’re an existing user of Merchant Center and Shopping ads, you don't have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings, and for new users of Merchant Center, we'll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.

These changes will take effect in the U.S. before the end of April, and we aim to expand this globally before the end of the year. Our help center has more details on how to participate in free product listings and Shopping ads.

We’re also kicking off a new partnership with PayPal to allow merchants to link their accounts. This will speed up our onboarding process and ensure we’re surfacing the highest quality results for our users. And we’re continuing to work closely with many of our existing partners that help merchants manage their products and inventory, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, to make digital commerce more accessible for businesses of all sizes.  

Solutions during this crisis will not be fast or easy, but we hope to provide a measure of relief for businesses and lay the groundwork for a healthier retail ecosystem in the future.

How to Pause your business online?

Do not turn off, Web Site! Post separate set of hours or mark as closed for COVID-19 and state intent. Most will understand.

If you're unable to fulfill orders or many of your products out of stock, you may be considering temporarily closing your online business. If the situation is temporary, meaning you expect to be able to sell products in the coming weeks or months, we recommend that you take action that preserves as much of your site's standing in Search as possible. This guide explains how you can safely pause your online business.

Limit your site's functionality (recommended)

If your situation is temporary and you plan to reopen your online business, we recommend that you keep your site online and limit the functionality. This is the recommended approach since it minimizes any negative effects on your site's presence in Search. People can still find your products, read reviews, or add wishlists so they can purchase at a later time. We recommend doing the following:

• Disable the cart functionality: Disabling the cart functionality is the simplest approach, and doesn't change anything for your site's visibility in Search.
• Display a banner or popup: A banner or popup div on all pages including the landing page quickly makes the status clear to users. Mention any known and unusual delays, shipping times, pick-up or delivery options, so that users continue with the right expectations. To prevent the content in the banner or popup from being shown in a snippet in Search results, use the data-nosnippet HTML attribute. Make sure to follow our guidelines on popups and banners.
• Update your structured data: If your site uses structured data (for example, Product, Book, Event), make sure to adjust it appropriately (reflecting the current product availability, or changing events to cancelled). If your business has a physical storefront, update Local Business structured data to reflect current opening hours.
• Check your Merchant Center feed: If you use Merchant Center, follow the best practices for the availability attribute.
• Tell Google about your updates: To ask Google to recrawl a limited number of pages (for example, the homepage), use Search Console. For a larger number of pages (for example, all of your product pages), use sitemaps.

Not recommended: Disable the whole website

Warning: Google's systems are designed to be robust and to help websites recover from temporary issues. However, removing a site completely from Google's index is a significant change that can take quite some time to recover from. There's no fixed time for a recovery from a complete removal, and there's no mechanism to speed that up. This is why we strongly recommend limiting functionality instead of removing the site from Search.

You may decide to disable the whole website. This is an extreme measure that should only be taken for a very short period of time (a few days at most), as it will otherwise have significant effects on the website in Search, even when implemented properly.

Make sure that you consider the following side effects of disabling your entire site:

• Your customers won't know what's happening with your business if they can't find your business online at all.
• Your customers can't find or read first-hand information about your business and its example, reviews, specs, repair guides, or manuals won't be findable. Third-party information may not be as correct or comprehensive as what you can provide. This often also affects future purchase decisions.
• Knowledge Panels may lose information, like contact phone numbers and your site's logo.
• Search Console verification will fail, and you will lose all access to information about your business in Search. Aggregate reports in Search Console will lose data as pages are dropped from the index.
• Ramping back up after a prolonged period of time will be significantly harder if your website needs to be reindexed first. Additionally, it's uncertain how long this would take, and whether the site would appear similarly in Search afterwards.

If you decide that you need to do this (again, not recommended), here are some options:

• If you need to urgently disable the site for 1-2 days, then return an informational error page with a 503 HTTP result code instead of all content. Make sure to follow the best practices for disabling a site.
• If you need to disable the site for a longer time, then provide an indexable homepage as a placeholder for users to find in Search by using the 200 HTTP status code.
• If you quickly need to hide your site in Search while you consider the options, you can temporarily remove a website from Search.

Best practices for disabling a site

Warning: Keep in mind that it's not possible for Google's systems to refresh titles, descriptions, metadata, or structured data included on a website if a page returns a 503 HTTP result code.

While we don't recommend disabling your site, here are some best practices if you decide to do this:

• Continue to allow crawling through the robots.txt file. Don't return a 503 HTTP result code for the robots.txt file because this blocks all crawling.
• Confirm a 503 HTTP result code locally by using curl or a similar tool. For example:

  curl -I -X GET "https://www.example.com/"
  HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
  Mime-Version: 1.0
  Content-Type: text/html
  (...)
• To minimize the server-side and client-side load of a 503 error page, follow these best practices:
  • Use the retry-after HTTP header with a best effort date or duration.
  • Use static HTML.
  • Minimize off-page resources; use inline CSS stylesheets and base-64-encoded images.
• Give your users clear guidance on future steps within the content of the error page. This could include:
  • Links to more information
  • The date when you expect the website to be online again, or when the information will be updated
  • How to contact customer service
• Don't disallow all crawling in the robots.txt file. Returning a valid robots.txt file that disallows all crawling may remove the website's content, and potentially its URLs, from Google Search.
• Don't block the website by returning 403, 404, 410 HTTP status codes, or with a noindex robots meta tag or x-robots-tag HTTP header. This will remove the website's URLs from Google Search.
• Don't use the temporary website removal tool in Search Console for closures. Doing so will make it impossible for users to find your website so that they can learn its status. Also, potential resellers or affiliates of your business's products may continue to be shown in Search.
• Don't block your robots.txt file with a 503 HTTP result code.

FAQs

What if I only close the site for a few weeks?

What if I want to exclude all non-essential products?

Can I ask Google to crawl less while my site is temporarily closed?

How do I get a page indexed or updated quickly?

What if I block a specific region from accessing my site?

Should I use the Removals Tool to remove out-of-stock products?

Resource: Google Search - How to Pause your Business - March 27, 2020