Overview:
Sitemaps are a tool used by search engines (most notably Google) to index your site for their search results. The sitemap will be produced by an automated process run by the CIMcloud Application.
The sitemap will typically be used for the Google Search Console. The URL for the sitemap is going to be:
- {Your URL}/sitemap.xml
- For example: https://mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
More information on what a Sitemap is and how it can be submitted to Google Search Console can be found in Google’s documentation, located here.
The sitemap build process starts by looking at any records (products, categories, and web pages) that are flagged to “Include in Sitemap” as “Yes”. Once the record has been flagged to be included, we have an automated process convert a list of these records into an XML format that can be accepted by search engines.
You can manually flag these records to be included in the sitemap on the products, categories, and webpage add-edit pages, or you can bulk update by importing a spreadsheet to the static pages table setting the column include_in_sitemap to “1”, using the ref_id as the static page that should be included. The static pages table holds the SEO meta information for your products, categories, and web pages.
Search engines by default will check if the sitemap.xml file is included at the root level; however, if you have multiple sitemaps on your site, or it isn’t at the root level, then you will need to submit these alternative URLs to the search engines you wish to index your site from. This can be handled manually through the search engine’s search console dashboard, or declaring the locations within your robots.txt file.
Results:
A sitemap will automatically be produced that can be utilized by search engines for their indexing process.