Sitemap¶
With the SEO function Sitemap Generator under Settings / Search engine optimization / Sitemap, after opening the Sitemap Generator page, you can create a sitemap for search engines. A sitemap contains a structured listing of all pages such as product details pages, category pages and content of your shop. In a sitemap for search engines, meta information is also stored for each page of your shop. Sitemap files are required by many search engines for registration or for special search engine functions.
Whether products, categories and content may be included in the sitemap is defined in the respective product, content or category. Under Settings / Search engine optimization / Sitemap, after opening the page, click on Execute in the Generate sitemap tab to create or update the sitemap file.
Attention
After generating the sitemap for the first time, the robots file should be recreated (see chapter Robots file).
Sitemaps are created in the public subfolder of the shop directory. By default, at least one sitemap is generated per activated language, depending on the number of entries, plus an index sitemap (sitemap_index.xml). The index sitemap should be specified to search engines etc. instead of the other sitemaps. After clicking on Execute, a green box with links to the respective sitemap is displayed.
Note
When opening the sitemap in the browser, a message such as This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below. is usually displayed. This does not constitute an error. The XML sitemap is intended for evaluation by search engines and is not meant for visualization.
Attention
For search engines such as Google, it is essential to specify the sitemap_index.xml. It references all sitemaps that were generated in the shop.
Under Settings / Search engine optimization / Sitemap, after opening the page, in the Configure sitemap tab, you can define general information for search engines regarding the intervals at which your sitemap file should be checked for changes.
Note
The change frequency set in the shop is merely a suggestion. The actual frequency with which the sitemap is updated depends on the respective search engine.
In the Publish all tab, you can set the checkmarks for Include in sitemap for all products and categories by clicking on Execute.
Note
Clicking on Execute in the Publish all tab does not yet generate a sitemap. To do this, switch to the Generate sitemap tab.