Finding and submitting your sitemap
All Shopit sales channels will automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains links to all your products, product images, pages, and blog posts. This can be found at www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
The sitemap is used by search engines like Google and Bing to crawl and index your site so that your website pages can appear in search results.
Note: availability of a sitemap.xml does not guarantee high search engine rankings. You would often need to do additional SEO to improve the actual ranking scores
Google Search Console
You can improve Google's understanding of your website and its page, by telling Google about your sitemap. This is best done AFTER your website has gone live on your chosen domain.
- Visit https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome to setup your account
- Choose Domain or URL prefix to begin
- Google will try and verify that you own the website you have entered
- It will give you a choice of steps to do this:
- Meta Tag on your website
- Google Analytics - we recommend doing this due to its advantages later
- File Upload to your server
- Domain Registrar tag
- Once you are verified, go to Sitemaps
- Add the full url of your own Shopit sales channel sitemap
Find your sitemap
The sitemap file is located at the root directory of your Shopify store's primary domain name. For example: johns-apparel.com/sitemap.xml.
This sitemap file is automatically generated and links to separate sitemaps for your products, collections, blogs, and webpages. It's automatically updated when you add a new webpage, product, collection, image, or blog post to your Shopify online store.
Submitting your sitemap
Submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console helps Google find and index valuable pages on your site.
The process of crawling and indexing your site can take time, and Google doesn't guarantee how long it'll take. Learn more about what to expect when your site is indexed from the Google Search Console Help.
Submitting pages certainly do NOT guarantee they will rank, but it does increases the likelihood that Google will SEE your pages.
Sitemaps for Internationalised (or secondary) sales channels
Sitemaps are generated on a per sales channel basis.
If you have created additional sites - for languages, niche demographics or simply to sell different products, you should treat each sales channel as having its own unique sitemap.
The SEO process you follow for your first site (correct product meta data, page titles and sub headings, url strings) should all be customised for that sales channel.
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