Google - Products now Shopping

[beu]

On Thanksgiving Google added "Products" to the top right hand navigation but they have changed it now to "Shopping". Clicking on "Shopping" takes users to Google Product Search Beta.

Should be interesting to see if such a change results in more visitors!

[rustybrick]

Great catch! I assume "products" wasn't giving them CTR they wanted.

[beu]

Thanks! You'd think, Google would already have such data?

Hmmm... same number of characters... wonder if "shopping" and it's ability to be a noun and/or verb comes into play?

[j0nyDzine]

Is there any actual rank benefit from having your products here, or simply another way to have your product listed on the web?
Obviously from the standpoint of "its another place to list your product", that's great, but in turn any benefit from the link from Google?
I guess it's hard to imagine that there isn't some effect somewhere on a link coming FROM Google to your product page somewhere down the road... but maybe that is for people wiser than me to say

[beu]

Originally Posted by j0nyDzine

Is there any actual rank benefit from having your products here, or simply another way to have your product listed on the web?

Great question j0nyDzine and always nice to see another poster from Atlanta!

The product search page pulls primarily from "Google Base". Queries like "Nike hat" result in a SERP showing products over "natural results".
http://www.google.com/search?q=nike+hat

The advantage of having your product/s included may not come from "Product Search" results as much as from their inclusion in the main SERPs.

[Dan01]

We used to list products on Froogle. I think that turned into Products, and I guess now Shopping?? We also tried Google Base. Those are great ideas, and free. We didn't get much action there though. We were selling on eBay at the time and listed on Froogle to see what would happen.

The funny thing is, now when we buy online we don't buy on eBay, we buy on Amazon. LOL