A catalog property represents a feed that you submit to the Google Knowledge Graph. Use your catalog property to monitor the status and content of your feed ingestions.
A catalog property's feed consists of one or more entities in the same vertical. For example, if you are a streaming video provider, you might have a feed that consists of individual entities that expose a Watch Action (which enables a user to watch one of the movie on a device). Your feed's vertical would be WatchAction, and the entities would be Movie, TVSeries, TVEpisode, and so on.
When you work with your Google contact to create and configure a new feed, Google will automatically create a catalog property in Search Console that represents your feed.
Supported verticals
The following verticals are supported by Search Console:
- WatchAction (video)
- ListenAction (music, radio, podcast)
- ReadAction (book, ebook, audiobook)
- BorrowAction (book, ebook, audiobook)
- Play Game Action (video game)
- Real Estate Listings
Learn more about how Google uses media action entities to enhance the user experience.
Use your catalog property to monitor your feed
Catalog properties support the following functionality to help you monitor your feeds on Google:
- Monitor the status of each feed: when it was read, if Google could read it, any file-level access or syntax errors, and more.
- See how many items Google could or could not import from the last feed.
- Monitor file and entity issues in the latest ingestion attempt, and your issue history for the past 90 days.
Catalog properties support only these entity types.
Open your catalog property using the property selector at the top of the navigation bar in Search Console:
A Search Console account can contain a mix of catalog and website properties.
Limitations
The first version of catalog properties has some limitations in Search Console. We hope to address these quickly and provide much more functionality in the near future.
- Feed properties are currently read-only in Search Console. If you need to make any changes to your feed ingestion, such the schedule, list of files, or other settings, please contact your Google feed partner directly.
- Not all verticals are supported. See the list of supported verticals.
- Incremental feeds are not supported.
- Only file-based submissions are supported. No other ingestion methods (for example, API calls) are supported.
About the data
- In most cases, status of an ingestion is reported in Search Console within a few hours after it occurs.
- An entity status of Valid or Valid with warnings is no guarantee that the entity is in the Knowledge Graph. These statuses mean only that the entity is eligible to be in the Knowledge Graph; other issues not available to Search Console might prevent it from being added.
Testing your feed during development
You can use this live testing tool to help debug portions of your feed during development.
The live feed
Your catalog property can have one or more feeds. The feed that will be pushed to Google is called the live feed; all other feeds are for testing purposes only.
When your feed is ready to be pushed to Google, work with your Google representative to designate the chosen feed in your property as your live feed. Once a feed is designated as live, all successful ingestions for that feed will be pushed to Google. Only one feed per catalog property can be designated as live. The live feed is marked with a Live badge in Search Console. (Badging occurs after the first successful push to Google, which can take a few hours.)
You cannot switch the live designation from one feed to another in your property. If you have multiple feeds and want a non-live feed to be pushed to Google, you must copy the content of the desired feed into the live feed. If you want to pause or discontinue feed pushes, talk to your Google representative.
Monitoring your feed ingestions
Monitor your feed ingestions in either the overview page for your property, or by viewing the detailed Feed report for each feed. Feed ingestion schedules are configured outside of Search Console, and independently of each other.
If you have only one feed, it will be labeled simply Feed in Search Console. If you have multiple feeds, all feeds will be labeled with the feed name in Search Console. A feed will appear in your property only after it has been evaluated and received one of the ingestion verdicts.
If a feed fails for any reason, Google will continue attempting ingestions on the feed as scheduled.
Success and failure
Feeds are subject to file-level failures (the ability to read and parse a file) and entity-level failures (the ability to parse and validate entities within the feed). For a live feed, a significant change in the number of entities can also trigger a failure.
Feed ingestion into the Knowledge Graph is atomic: if an ingestion succeeds, it is applied; if an ingestion fails, it is not applied. If the ingestion is applied, the entire inventory associated with the feed is removed from the Knowledge Graph and replaced with all eligible entities from the new ingestion. If an ingestion fails, no change is made in the Knowledge Graph inventory.
Tips for a successful ingestion
- Make sure that Google has access to crawl your feed files. Work out the details with your Google contact.
- File-level failures can be transitory, so consider waiting through a few consecutive feed failures before trying to debug ingestion failures, unless you are confident about the reason for failure.
- The Google feed crawler ignores robots.txt rules.
- The Google feed crawler follows redirects. However, it's bad practice to use permanent redirects for your feed; if your feed file locations change, update your feed settings.
