You might have a website with a stunning loading speed, attractive design, well-crafted content and a unique variety of products. But it's all good as long as people can discover your store. That's what you need Shopify XML sitemap for — to help search engines discover, crawl and index your website.
While XML sitemap is a must for your Shopify SEO, it's not the only way to get indexed by Google. We'll get to that right after we cover what is an XML sitemap, why you need it and how to manage it in your Shopify store.
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What is a Shopify Sitemap?
Shopify sitemap is an XML file that contains all your website links — products, collections, pages, and blogs. It serves as a directory for the search engines where they can retrieve data about your pages (when they were last updated, whether there's an alternative page, etc.).
Note: XML sitemap is generated automatically in Shopify and can't be edited.
Here's what it looks like:
What's in the Sitemap?
Shopify categorizes the XML sitemap into logical page groupings. So once you open your sitemap you'll land on the sitemap index file with different child sitemaps.
Sitemap Index File
The sitemap index file contains links to the child sitemaps based on the page type:
- products (sitemap_products_1.xml)
- collections (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
- blogs (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
- pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)
Note: a new child sitemap is generated when the initial child sitemap passes the 5,000 URL threshold. So there might be more than 4 child sitemaps in the index file.
Child Sitemap
Each child sitemap file contains a list of URLs of a particular page type with the following information:
- <url> — the URL of a particular page
- <lastmod> — date when a page was last modified
- <changefreq> — an estimate of how often a page updates
- <image:loc> — featured image of a page
- <image:title> — title of the featured image of a page
Note: you can just submit the main index sitemap to the search engines. They will discover your URLs through the child sitemaps.
How to Find Sitemap in Shopify?
All XML sitemaps in Shopify are found by adding the "/sitemap.xml" to your domain, like this:
e.g. domain.com/sitemap.xml
How to Edit the Shopify Sitemap?
Unfortunately, there are no options to edit or upload a custom Shopify sitemap, other than using some custom apps. But in the long run, it's just best to use the default option to avoid any errors and indexing issues.
You want Google to discover your new and updated pages as fast as possible. Shopify keeps your XML sitemap updated for you, automatically. Why add pressure on yourself by tweaking these options?
How to Submit a Shopify Sitemap to Google?
Every Shopify store has the XML sitemap generated automatically. So all you need to do is just grab the sitemap URL and submit it to Google.
1. Navigate to the Google Search Console > Indexing > Sitemaps.
2. Add new sitemap by pasting your Shopify sitemap URL in a corresponding section.
Once Google receives your sitemap, you'll discover all indexed and non-indexed pages under Indexing > Pages.
How to Index Your Store in Google Faster?
While XML sitemap is the first step in your store indexing journey, there are faster ways to get indexed by search engines.
Once search crawlers discover your pages, they add them to the crawling queue. Then, once a page is crawled important information from it goes to the Google index. Right after that, a page is ranked on search results.
To get there faster, you need the Google Indexing API. It's a way to bypass the crawling queue and send page content directly to Google.
Is it hard to integrate the Indexing API?
It is. But not with the from Magefan. It does all the technical heavy lifting, leaving you to choose whether to send indexing requests from the admin manually or automatically.
