Send a Listings Feed
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Here are Oodle's guidelines on how you can get your listings on the Oodle website and the entire Oodle network.

Oodle Feed Guidelines

The quickest and most reliable way to get your listings into Oodle is to provide us with a feed (a file containing listings data). Oodle uses this data to index your listings but not to present them (i.e., our search results always link directly to the listings on your site).

Due to limited resources, in order to maintain our quality of service for everyone, we currently ask that feed submissions contain more than 100 listings.

For answers to some frequently asked questions about feeds, please refer to the Oodle Feed FAQ.

Feed Content:

Oodle would like as much information about each listing as possible. The more information we have, the more ways we can let users find your listings.

The set of understood fields for a listing varies somewhat depending on what top-level category the listing falls into. The field documentation for a given category, complete with sample feeds in each format we accept, can be found at these links:

Jobs Pets Services
Merchandise Real Estate Tickets and Events
Personals Rental Housing Vehicles

Please note that we generally require the full set of listings to be included in each feed update. This allows us to expire those listings we have previously seen, but which are now absent from the feed. (For feeds that are exceptionally large, or very frequently updated, we can work out an arrangement to receive deltas.)

Feed Format:

Oodle strongly prefers XML feeds, though we can also accept CSV files, as well as tab-delimited text files.

XML feeds should be well-formed. The best way to ensure this is to run your prospective feed through an xml validator or parser to check it.

There are a number of common issues to be aware of when creating an xml feed.

If you are going to send us a delimited text file, please include descriptive column names as the first line of this file.

Compression (optional):

Oodle has the capability to handle feeds that have been compressed via gzip or zip. This often dramatically reduces the size of the feed file being transmitted.

Fetch Method:

Oodle can fetch feeds from your site via HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP. We only fetch your feed as often as it updates.

For large and/or featured partners, if fetching feeds from your site is not possible, Oodle can also set up an ftp account so that you may push feeds to our ftp server.

Contacting Oodle:

When you have a feed that is ready, please go to our submission form submit it.

If you have any other questions, please contact us at feed@oodle.com
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