Google Data

By Steven De La O, Google Base Support

Back in December 2005, Clint published a post about the label attribute and its usefulness in helping searchers find your items. A little more than a year later, we've had the opportunity to evaluate the information included for this attribute, and we'd like to announce changes that affect its use. Moving forward, we will no longer support the label attribute. We've found that label values can easily be submitted for other, more relevant attributes, and we'd like you to start using our predefined attributes or your own custom attributes to submit them. As an example, let's take a look at the comic book collection item noted in Clint's post to find out how this change can be accomplished. He included the following label values: Captain America, Superman, DC comics, Marvel, graphic novel, super heroes. The following table lists alternative attributes under which these values can be submitted.

Attribute name		Value
hero (custom)		Captain America
hero (custom)		Superman
publisher (predefined)		DC comics
publisher (predefined)		Marvel
product_type (predefined)		graphic novel
genre (predefined)		super heroes

We understand that these changes require time and effort to execute, but we feel strongly that they will help improve the Google Base experience for you, our data providers, and for folks searching the web to find your items on Google. If you have thoughts on this change, feel free to visit our Google Base Help Discussion group to share them. We'll be listening.