Has GoogleBase missed the mark?

I checked in at GoogleBase this morning and found that all of my articles were inactive, bar 3 which had been disapproved (and guess what topic they covered :))

In the past I’ve been able to search and find them, not so today. I renewed my bulk upload and it was instantly accepted.

Problems remain however and Google doesn’t seem to be tackling the issues

• The link to “Your published items: http://base.google.com/base/a/rainchx” doesn’t work
• Despite sending the articles through with the Author attached, my name is put to each of the articles
• The User Group appears to be completely ignored by Google staff, even when valid flaws are posted (as opposed to newbie mistakes).

Why does Author matter?

You can set the author for an article using [code]Andrew King[/code]

but GoogleBase blithely ignores it. Yet, on a site such as PropertyTalk which publishes articles by a variety of authors it makes sense for the site owner to manage the submission – and to give the actual Author’s name. Yet, despite making allowances for author, it’s not used.

The GoogleBase confusion

So, having set up products in Froogle, made a site that’s bot friendly, submitted an xml sitemap, tracked the SERPs a webmaster now has to tackle GoogleBase. The duplication of effort is confusing, the differentiation between the regular search tool, Froogle and GoogleBase is unclear.

According to their Adsense Blog:

So what’s cool about Google Base for publishers? For starters, it allows you to make your content more accessible and useful. You can describe the content you upload with your own keywords and attributes so users can easily find it when they search Google Base, Froogle, Local or Google.com. For example, if you’re posting a recipe, you might include attributes such as ‘Meal: Breakfast’, ‘Main Ingredient: Eggs’, and ‘Servings: 4’.

Sorry guys, I thought that’s what meta tags were for!

Will GoogleBase come out of “Beta”, or will it quietly disappear? Perhaps thats why there’s no support?

Ref:

• Official Google Base Blog
• Google Base Help Discussion at Google Groups