Sitemap

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages on your store that are accessible to crawlers e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.  A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for our store. 

All StoreHippo stores automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains all your products, categories, pages and blog posts. It also supports Google's Image Sitemaps extension. Your sitemap file is located at sitemap.xml at your store's URL (for example, www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml).

Sitemap includes all published records for the following entities.

• Products
• Categories
• Collections
• Brands
• Pages

Each record in the Sitemap file contains following properties for the records to give you more control over how Search Engines should treat those records.

Sitemap priority

• Sitemap priority defines the priority of the particular page in your store, pages with higher priorities are crawled by Google more often.
• You can provide the sitemap priority to the pages within a range of 0.0 to 1.0.
• The page with sitemap priority 1.0 will be considered on highest priority and the page with 0.0 will be considered as the lowest priority.
• Best practice is to keep the Home page of the store on highest priority, then the categories, collection, brand pages, then keep the product detail pages. Then you can set the priority of other static pages or blogs.

Cannonical URL (Alternate URL)

Canonical URL is an approach in SEO that helps you in setting a canonical or preferred version of any web page in case of URL duplication. You can define the canonical URL to keep that URL on priority and Google will stop crawling rest of the duplicate URLs of the same web page.

Adding Custom Sitemap

StoreHippo allows you to update the sitemap of your store on your own, the option to upload the XML file is provided in the SEO section under settings. However, it is recommended to use the automatic sitemap.xml that StoreHippo provides, as the automatic sitemap file gets automatically updated as soon as any new page or product is added in the store.

Blocking certain pages from Search Engines

You can block certain pages by using robots meta tag. For more details, you can refer Block search indexing with meta tags.