This article is in four parts:
- What Is Google Base? How To Upload Content to Google Base
- How To Edit Items in Google Base
- Upload Google Base Content-Google Base Dashboard-Google Base Bulk Uploads
- Google Base First Impressions-What Is The Point of Google Base?
Google Base - Ready to Post
After waiting for over an hour with no image upload, I decided to scroll down to the bottom of the Google Base Edit Item page. You have a few options here: Preview, Save Draft, Publish, or Cancel.I selected Preview, and was informed that some of my content did not meet the Google Base editorial guidelines. Well, somehow, my title and Attributes field were erased, so I had to fill those in again (a minor irritation, but irritating nonetheless).
Finally, I got all the bugs out (literally), and my item was ready to Edit or Publish. I chose Edit and was taken back to the page that I detailed above already. From there I chose Save Draft just to see what would happen, and was given this message: "Draft Saved, Back to Dashboard."
Google Base Dashboard
Okay, now, what's the Google Base Dashboard? Think of the Google Base Dashboard as your control panel for all your content uploaded (or waiting to be uploaded) to Google Base. In my Google Base dashboard right now, I have one active item, and I have the ability to publish drafts, deactivate, or delete forever. I chose Publish Drafts for my item.Deactivate means a couple of different things. If you have an item for sale, and you don't want it to be for sale anymore, then you can choose to "deactivate" it. On the other hand, if you'd like to stop showing your content publicly, but don't want to delete it, you may deactivate your item.
Finally, delete forever means pretty much what it sounds like. Don't click on this unless you really mean it.
Two things I noticed when I hit Publish: there is NO expiration limit on items submitted. None. Therefore, instead of paying eBay fees to display your auction listing for a specified amount of time, you can just list it on Google Base for however long you want to.
Secondly, it takes about 15-60 minutes to publish items according to the Google Base dashboard, but then I saw in the Google Base Help that I should expect a wait of "several hours." I'm going with the "several hours" option here, since I've already waited about 45 minutes.
Bulk Upload in Google Base
If you've got a load of content that you'd like to upload to Google Base, Google Base Bulk Upload is your new best friend. Well, actually, it's your best friend if you can understand what the heck it's talking about. The Bulk Uploads page is not written to the average Web searcher; heck, I couldn't figure out what they were telling me to do.One of the steps is this: "Create a plain text tab delimited or XML file with your information." Yes, well, what if you don't know what either of those items are? This particular Google Base option does not seem to be very average Web searcher friendly; in fact, I would suspect that most people will be instantly put off by the overly complicated instructions here for bulk uploading files. I was not impressed by this feature.
This Google Base profile is continued on page four.
