Google published an internal interview on its Search Off the Record podcast with John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman (who you know) and Irina Tuduce from the Google Shopping team. Irina Tuduce has been with Google for 18 or so years and she provided a super technical overview of Google Shopping and Merchant Center.
If you work with Shopping or Merchant Center, either organically or through Google Ads, it is worth a listen to.
Here is the interview you can listen to on YouTube:
Here are some high level topics covered in this:
- Google uses both web search infrastructure and a dedicated shopping search infrastructure to display shopping results.
- Websites with schema.org markup might show up in the “Shopping” tab or “Image” tab on the main Google search page (dotcom) with product snippets or rich snippets displaying price information and more
Merchant Center accounts let you do more, such as:
- Upload a product feed specifying your inventory.
- Utilize an automatic crawl feature that extracts product information from your website, even if not in your feed (requires schema.org markup).
