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For anyone that sells on Amazon, I came across this information today posted by an Amazon mod on the Amazon Seller Forum. Hard to believe that something this important wouldn't be formally communicated, but this is Amazon we are talking about...
This is of particular importance to those of you (@LightHouse) that use flat files to take keywords up into the thousands of characters. Your search results will be suppressed, effective immediately per below.
Hello Sellers,
We understand your concern with the input of search keywords.
Amazon launched a feature that limits the length of the generic keywords attribute to less than 200 bytes in the IN marketplace, 500 bytes in the JP marketplace and 250 bytes in every other marketplace except the CN marketplace. The limits have shown to improve the quality of Search results. To date, the Search team has been suppressing generic keyword attributes that exceed these limits. This will apply to newly registered ASINs as well as existing ASINs.
We recommend following the guidelines below to optimize your use of the generic keywords attribute.
Key Guidelines for the Generic Keywords Attribute:
Keep the content within the prescribed length limit (less than 250, 200 for IN, 500 for JP):
For further information, please refer to the optimize listings for search and browse help page .
-Susan
I had a question sent to me in a Private Message, and I wanted to make a clarification here.
The prescribed length limit is less than 250 in ALL markets, except IN, JP and CN. Therefore, the prescribed length limit is less than 250 for the NA marketplaces, .ca, .com, .mx
Edited by: SusanH@SellerSupport on Jul 20, 2017 10:48 AM
This is of particular importance to those of you (@LightHouse) that use flat files to take keywords up into the thousands of characters. Your search results will be suppressed, effective immediately per below.
Hello Sellers,
We understand your concern with the input of search keywords.
Amazon launched a feature that limits the length of the generic keywords attribute to less than 200 bytes in the IN marketplace, 500 bytes in the JP marketplace and 250 bytes in every other marketplace except the CN marketplace. The limits have shown to improve the quality of Search results. To date, the Search team has been suppressing generic keyword attributes that exceed these limits. This will apply to newly registered ASINs as well as existing ASINs.
We recommend following the guidelines below to optimize your use of the generic keywords attribute.
Key Guidelines for the Generic Keywords Attribute:
Keep the content within the prescribed length limit (less than 250, 200 for IN, 500 for JP):
- The length limit applies to the total content in all generic keyword fields (A max of 5 attributes).
- Number of bytes equals number of characters for alphanumeric characters (i.e. a–z, A–Z, 0–9) while other characters, such as umlauts (e.g. ä), each correspond to 2 bytes or more. Examples of other character byte sizes include £ (2 bytes), € (3 bytes) or ❤ (3 bytes).
- Spaces and punctuation (“;” “,” “.”) do not contribute to the length limit, but words should still be separated by spaces. There is no need for punctuation, such as commas, between words.
- Do not include keywords that are not descriptive of the product.
- Do not include brand names (even your own) or other product identifiers.
- Do not duplicate content that is present in other attributes, such as title and bullet points.
- There is no need to repeat keywords; once is enough.
- We recommend using keywords that are synonyms, hypernyms, or spelling variations of content in visible attributes (e.g. if the product title contains ‘whiskey’, the generic keyword attribute may contain spelling variations (‘whisky’); if the product is a ‘guitar’, the generic keywords may contain a hypernym (‘musical instrument’).
For further information, please refer to the optimize listings for search and browse help page .
-Susan
I had a question sent to me in a Private Message, and I wanted to make a clarification here.
The prescribed length limit is less than 250 in ALL markets, except IN, JP and CN. Therefore, the prescribed length limit is less than 250 for the NA marketplaces, .ca, .com, .mx
Edited by: SusanH@SellerSupport on Jul 20, 2017 10:48 AM
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