Fixing disapprovals
Disapprovals are ranked by how many products they cost you, not by how alarming they sound. Working the diagnostics tab top to bottom in the order Google lists them is how a week disappears for a hundred recovered items.
Triage order
- Account-level issues first. A suspension or a website claim problem takes the whole catalogue down; nothing at item level matters until it is cleared.
- Price and availability mismatch. The largest single category of item disapprovals, and usually systemic rather than per product.
- Landing page problems. 404s, redirects to categories, and pages blocked from Google’s crawler.
- Image problems. Overlays and watermarks are a policy fix; broken image links are an infrastructure fix.
- Missing required attributes. Category by category, apparel first, because it has the most.
- Policy categories. Last, because most of them are not fixable in the feed.
Price mismatch is almost never a price problem
It is a timing problem. Your feed says one price, Google crawls the landing page and finds another, usually because the feed updated and the page cache did not, or because the page shows a price with tax and the feed does not, or because a promotion started on one and not the other.
The durable fixes are structural: add microdata to the product page so Google reads the price rather than guessing it, make feed updates and page updates share a source, and be careful that VAT and currency are handled the same way in both places.
Resubmitting the same feed does not clear a mismatch. Google re-crawls the landing page on its own schedule, and the item stays disapproved until the two agree at the moment it looks.
Read the numbers, not the list
The diagnostics tab shows issues by count of affected items. One issue affecting 4,000 products and one affecting 3 look identical in the interface. Sort by impact and fix the systemic causes; the long tail of individual oddities can wait, and often disappears when the systemic fix lands.
Stopping them recurring
- Alert on the disapproval count, not on individual disapprovals.
- Treat a sudden spike as a deployment problem until proven otherwise, because it usually correlates with a site release.
- Check the count after every catalogue import, not once a month.
- Keep a note of which fixes were systemic. The same three causes will produce most of next quarter’s disapprovals too.