Giving Google What It Wants
Rich Snippets
Or, Another Reason to Appreciate Google Base Feeds
Google’s Merchant Center Feeds (previously called Google Base Feeds) are one of two methods to get data into Google that can be used for Rich Snippets. What are rich snippets? They are search results enhanced with structured data from your web site. Structured data, in this sense, include price, availability and product reviews from your product-specific page.
How does Google get the data for rich snippets? From the Merchant Center Feed (produced automatically by the Profits Plus Sitemaps Module) and the use of the rel=”canonical” link element in your product pages. This link element lets Google know that several versions of a page are all the same content. No matter what path you used to get to the product page (and that path may be reflected in the url), the content is the same as the “canonical” page. Knowing this helps the Google algorithms properly represent the data.
