Froogle Penalties and Filters

[rustybrick]

Has anyone seen any filters or penalties instituted in the Froogle results?

I am hearing some "duplicate content filters" are taking place. This would make logical sense to me but does anyone have evidence or has anyone heard of this?

[Dodger]

I think duplicate content would be hard to avoid, wouldn't it? This is not the same type of duplicate content that we are used to talking about in normal search results.

One place I could see this type of phenomenon would probably be in those As Seen on TV products possibly. They all lead back to one source eventually, is that what kind of duplicate content you might be referring to?

One thing that would be curious to watch is to see if anything NOT showing up in Froogle is having the same effect in normal search results as well. It would make it much easier to spot these various replicated cookie cutter sites I would think. It also may explain why some people are experiencing drops in Google referrals, while Yahoo referrals are going up in this field of the net.

[rustybrick]

I think duplicate content would be hard to avoid, wouldn't it? This is not the same type of duplicate content that we are used to talking about in normal search results.

Right, but when you have three stores, slightly different content but same product. Lets say you submit store one, then a month later store two and three are indexed in Froogle naturally. Then all of a sudden, store one drops off. That is what I have been hearing...

[Dodger]

I take it that none of these stores provide a datafeed to Google then? I am not sure how they index Froogle to tell you the truth. It has been a mystery to me, but their "natural" crawls are way off the mark in my opinion.

I have seen incorrect product indentifications being made for the most part. Sometimes results come from link pages that mention a product by name and the page is not an ordering page, heck the site it is on has nothing to do with the product.

Froogle has the requirement that the site have it's own online purchasing with the site, no affilliateships or call 1-800 numbers are allowed. They must have their own secured payment processing. I am wondering how they are able to determine this in the first place? Is it possible that when Store #2 and Store #3 go online that there is some kind of connection between them and Store #1 ... a connection that says "hey, affilliate here!" ?