Ecommerce businesses that participate in Google’s comparison shopping engine, Google Shopping, should take notice of a few changes for the holiday season.

According to this recent update from Google, new data feeds submitted after November 22, 2011 will be restricted to 500 products until further notice. It’s important to note, existing feeds will remain unaffected. This is most likely due to expected traffic increases during the holiday season and will likely only last a few weeks.

Secondly, Google has placed a new restriction on the number of data feeds a store can register from one country.  Account holders may only have 3 feeds for each country.

Is this an attempt to reduce the processing time of feeds on their servers? Could this be indicative of bigger changes within Google Shopping?  What do you think?