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A couple of weeks ago, the Google Base team announced a change: it claimed that it was “requiring” merchants to include additional attributes for product listings, but no time limit was mentioned. Now it appears that a deadline – February 28 – has been set, and a lot of people aren’t happy about it.

“akmac,” a veteran member of the WebmasterWorld Forum, posted a bit of text from an e-mail that he (or she) had received (and Search Engine Roundtable observes credit for spotting it).

“Froogle merchants are being asked, by the end of February, to use bulk uploads in the Google Base format and to include five additional attributes – or else they will no longer be listed,” the message stated.

Merchants will have a fair number of options to choose from, at least – 16 are listed in the original post on the Google Base Blog.

“And whenever you have it, we welcome any additional information that you can provide,” wrote Cynthia Kwon of Google’s Strategic Partner Development. “Just think of these attributes as a baseline. And we encourage you to use our custom attributes feature.”

Merchants aren’t feeling quite as cheery, though. Many of them expect that the “switch,” such as it is, will be difficult – or impossible. Meg Geddes wrote, “Between all of our clients for whom we feed Froogle, we have about 25,000 listings currently. We’re probably going to take them all out now with these new requirements. They don’t fit any of the products or listings that we currently have . . . and it sure appears that Froogle doesn’t really want any of the listings anyway, otherwise they wouldn’t put such restrictions on it.”

“Too bad,” Geddes continued, “because I have other catalog type clients who wanted in, but this just isn’t a good fit anymore.”

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