A 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).
The sitemap includes all published records for the following entities:
Each record in the Sitemap file contains the following properties for the records to give you more control over how Search Engines should treat those records.
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 the rest of the duplicate URLs of the same web page.
StoreHippo allows you to update the sitemap of your store on your own. To do so, follow the steps mentioned below:
Now, the custom sitemap will be added. 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 to the store.
You can view the custom sitemap file at sitemap-custom.xml at your store's URL (for example, www.yourstore.com/sitemap-custom.xml). If you open the sitemap.xml at your store's URL, such as( www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml) you will see the XML file as shown in the image below:
The URL for the custom sitemap will be mentioned in the sitemap.xml file as shown in the image above.
You can block certain pages by using the robots meta tag. For more details, you can refer to Block search indexing with meta tags.
StoreHippo allows you to add different sitemaps for different substores. Click here to know more about adding the substore based sitemaps.