Extended Sitemap Configuration

Our extension greatly expands the possibilities of sitemap generation. It can alter standard Magento procedures, and add crucial information there that can boost indexing of the store by web crawlers. It can also help you to manage multiple sitemaps, which you can create with different parameters and for different purposes.

• What "Google Sitemap" is ?
• How to Generate a Sitemap
• Frontend Sitemap Settings

Sitemap Example

Sitemap is a special XML file which is typically located at the root of your store and contains important data on crawlable links for your store that you would like Google to become aware of as soon as possible. You can see its location in Marketing > Advanced SEO Suite > Site Map, in columns Path and Link for Google. There are two different ways to make your sitemap available to Google: submit it to Google using the Search Console Sitemaps tool (preferable), or insert the corresponding link anywhere in your robots.txt. More information in sitemaps is available here.

A typical sitemap is a simple, human-readable file, which contain an array of XML records including URL, lastmod, changefreq, priority, image, etc. Sitemaps feature a number of optional elements that can be read by Google crawler. A sitemap.xml file, generated by a native Magento mechanism, can look like this:

<urlset>
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/gear.html</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-12-10T10:29:50+00:00</lastmod>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>0.5</priority>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/strive-shoulder-pack.html</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-12-10T10:29:52+00:00</lastmod>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>1.0</priority>
        <image:image>
            <image:loc>http://www.example.com/pub/media/catalog/product/m/b/mb04-black-0.jpg</image:loc>
            <image:title>Strive Shoulder Pack</image:title>
            <image:caption>Image</image:caption>
        </image:image>
        '<PageMap xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-pagemap/1.0">
            <DataObject type="thumbnail">
                <Attribute name="name" value="Strive Shoulder Pack"/>
                <Attribute name="src" value="http://www.example.com/pub/media/catalog/product/m/b/mb04-black-0.jpg"/>
            </DataObject>
        </PageMap>'
    </url>
</urlset>

Our extension provides capabilities for additionally tweaking your sitemap.xml, making it more managable and SEO-friendly. These include:

• making product images' URLs SEO-friendly according to the template (if the corresponding option of SEO Suite extension is enabled for frontend images)
• adding product images' "title" and "caption" tags according to the template (if the corresponding option of SEO Suite extension is enabled for frontend images)
• removing particular links from both HTML and XML sitemaps
• adding custom links to both variants of a sitemap if needed
  

You can turn the example above in something like this:

<urlset>
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/gear.html</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-12-10T10:29:50+00:00</lastmod>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>0.5</priority>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/strive-shoulder-pack.html</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-12-10T10:29:52+00:00</lastmod>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>1.0</priority>
        <image:image>
            <image:loc>http://www.example.com/pub/media/product/28fb/strive-shoulder-pack.jpg</image:loc>
            <image:title>The best Strive Shoulder Pack on the market</image:title>
            <image:caption>Image</image:caption>
        </image:image>
        <PageMap xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-pagemap/1.0">
            <DataObject type="thumbnail">
                <Attribute name="name" value="Strive Shoulder Pack"/>
                <Attribute name="src" value="http://www.example.com/pub/media/product/28fb/strive-shoulder-pack.jpg"/>
            </DataObject>
        </PageMap>
    </url>
</urlset>

How to Generate Google Sitemap

1. Tune-up your sitemap settings in Marketing > Advanced SEO Suite > Settings > Extended Site Map, and refer here for more information.

2. Go to Marketing > Advanced SEO Suite > Site Map, and press the Add Sitemap button.

3. Sitemap generation pages consists of two fields:

   • Filename - defines the name, under which the sitemap will be saved. If you wish to regenerate a standard sitemap, use sitemap.xml.
   • Path - defines the path where the sitemap should be placed. If you wish to regenerate a standard sitemap, use /.
4. Manually edit robots.txt to include a generated sitemap to the web indexing process. Useful information, and how to do it, can be found here.

Frontend Sitemap Settings

Settings for Sitemap Generation are located at Marketing > Advanced SEO Suite > Settings > Extended Site Map, Frontend Sitemap Settings subsection:

• Base URL Path To Frontend Sitemap - Base path to the frontend sitemap page.
• Meta Title - allows you to add a meta title to the sitemap page.
• Meta Keywords - allows you to add a keyword section to the sitemap page.
• Meta Description - allows you to add a meta description of the sitemap page.
• H1 Header - allows you to add a special header to the sitemap page (useful for multiple sitemap instances).
• Show Products - if enabled, a list of all active catalog products will be displayed in the frontend sitemap.
• Show Non-salable Products - if enabled, will be exported all products. Disable this option if you want to hide disabled products.
• Show CMS Pages - if enabled, a list of CMS pages will be displayed in the frontend sitemap.
• Ignore CMS Pages - defines a list of CMS pages which will not be displayed in the frontend sitemap.
• Show Stores - if enabled, a list of Store Views will be displayed in the frontend sitemap.

• Additional links - defines a comma-separated list of pages which should be added to the frontend sitemap. For example, you can add links Our Promotions and Customer Account to the sitemap:

  /promotions/, Our Promotions
  /customer/account/, Customer Account

• Exclude by pattern - defines a list of patterns for links that will be excluded from the frontend sitemap.
• Limit the number of links on one page - if not empty, the whole sitemap will be turned into a sequence of lesser sitemaps.