Creating a Sitemap

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.

Sitemaps are generated once per day, please submit a support ticket if you would like to generate this more frequently while you make changes.

Include Records in Your Sitemap

Flagging records to be included in the sitemap:

• You can manually flag these records to be included in the sitemap on the products, categories, and webpage add-edit pages
  • Mark the question “Include in Sitemap” to “Yes”
• You can bulk update by importing a spreadsheet to any of the following:
  • static_pages table with fields:
    • ref_id: The reference ID of the static_pages record
      • You can run an export before importing to get all the static_pages ref_id values
    • sm_include_in_sitemap: 1
  • Products table with fields:
    • sku
    • sm_include_in_sitemap
  • Product_categories table with fields:
    • id
    • sm_include_in_sitemap
  • Pages table with fields:
    • ref_id
    • sm_include_in_sitemap

Confirm your records are flagged correctly when the following question is marked “Yes” on the respective page (products, categories, web pages, or static pages):

Submitting Sitemap(s) Location

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.

Google Search Console

Bing Webmaster Tools

Result

A sitemap will automatically be produced that can be utilized by search engines for their indexing process.