Your sitemap is a file that helps search engines locate, crawl, and then index the content on your website. Sitemaps are there to demonstrate to search engines what pages on your site are the most important ones.
As a website owner, you may want to submit your sitemap to one of popular search engines, or maybe even to all of them. You can find your sitemap at yourdomain.com/xmlsitemap.php. This link will also be used when you’ll submit your sitemap to search engines.
How to submit a site map to Google
Technically, there’s no burning reason to submit your BigCommerce site map to Google Search Console manually as Google can locate and explore your website and sitemap organically. Though it’s only subject to small or medium-sized websites. Below is what Google Search Console says about events when submitting your BigCommerce sitemap is possibly a good idea:
Supposing your site is really large - the bigger it is, the more likely Googlebot may count out some particular pages on it and within your site map. This is especially sensitive for large ecommerce sites. If your BigCommerce website is used as an online store, that’s your story - submit your sitemap manually.
- If there’s a large archive of content pages, isolated pages, or not linked together pages on your BigCommerce site and sitemap.
- In case you have a new website that hasn’t got many (or even one) backlinks. As long as Googlebot uses links to explore pages, it also uses links directed from other domains to get to your website. And if other website haven't begun to link to your site yet, it will take much longer before your sitemap will get noticed. So in order not to give up traffic for your BigCommerce website, you’d better submit your sitemap to Search Console in a manual way.
- There’s a lot of multimedia content like images, video, on your BigCommerce site or it is demonstrated in Google News. All these files, for sure, will be noticed by Google some day, but your target here is to get your BigCommerce site and site map marked more rapidly.
To get the idea of how many of your site and sitemap has been indexed by Google, simply perform a “site: ” search. But you should bear in mind: Google will present you an approximate number of results, and keep in mind that this number is not perfectly reliable. So it is always better to submit your BigCommerce website and sitemap to Google Search Console manually.
Tip: A small website is characterised by Google Search Console as the one having about 500 pages on it.
In case you think that submitting your sitemap to Search Console is just right for you, then follow few simple steps below to to perform this task:
- Find your sitemap. You can do so by simply implementing the steps we’ve detailed previously.
- Go to your Search Console user account, and then get to your correct property. It is really important that you double-check you get the property for the correct domain you want to submit your site map for. Bear in mind that http: // and https: // are not equivalent, and example.com and www.example.com are not the same too.
- Open “Sitemap” field right under the “Index” leftward site navigation board.
- Make away with outmoded and outdated site maps in case any were submitted. To select this feature and outdated site map on your website, click three stacked dots at the right corner of your site page.
- Include your site map URL downward a “Add a new sitemap” and again pick “Submit”. Thenceforth you’ll simply need to submit the URL’s end of your sitemap, not just the BigCommerce domain portion.
- Near at hand Search Console will confirm that your site map has been discovered. It may take some time before your sitemap gets crawled.
But it’s not only Search Console you may want to submit your BigCommerce site and sitemap to. Now then let’s observe how you can submit your site map to Bing and Yahoo.
How do I submit BigCommerce sitemap to Bing and Yahoo search
In certain circumstances, you might find it vital to submit your site map to Bing or Yahoo to get your BigCommerce site noticed by users of these search engines. Follow these steps:
- Proceed to the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard, and after that sign in utilizing your login and password.
- Look for the “Sitemap” instrument on the prime screen of your admin dashboard, and then open the Sitemap widget.
- Type the URL of your sitemap into the input box in the bottom-right corner, and then click “Submit”. Your site map’sURL is going to be submitted to Bing and right subsequently - attached to your register of sitemaps over the input box.
Remember that if you wish your BigCommerce website to pop up in Yahoo search, you’ll also have to submit your site map to Bing as long as Yahoo Search results derive from the Yahoo crawler (Slurp) and Bing's crawler. And to manage how your site appears in Yahoo Search you’ll have to employ meta tags and robots.txt with submitting the site map.
Which way to add sitemap to robots.txt
Your robots.txt file is a simple text that is placed in the root directory of your BigCommerce site. The robots.txt file is there to tell search engines what exactly areas of your site are to be crawled/indexed, and the ones tat shouldn’t. Likewise, it displays what search engines are authorised to crawl your BigCommerce site and sitemap. And it’s essential to have this file present on your website because it’s the first goal a search engine bot will look for before performing any other actions with a site map.
Exactly like robots.txt file does, a site map allows search engines to crawl into and then index all pages of your BigCommerce website gathered in one place. You can create a robots.txt file that will comprise your sitemap by following these clear steps described below:
Find your BigCommerce site map URL
If you or the programmer you team with have already created your sitemap, then it’s probably can be found at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. The word “Example” here can be changed to your BigCommerce domain name. You are welcome to double-check if it’s true by pasting this URL in the browser right where you will either detect your sitemap or the 404 not found page indicating that this exact location is not the one having your sitemap.
You can also apply the help of Google search operators. All you are to do here is simply type site: example.com filetype: xml within Google's search bar.
In case you still can’t locate your site map, then apparently it does not exist. In that event, create the site map on your own or search for help from a skilled developer.
Locate your robots.txt
And likewise it was with your site map, you can look if your robots.txt file is out there on your site by writing http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and change the “example” by your domain. If it emerges that you haven’t got this file, in this case you need to make one and make sure that it was adjoined to the top-level directory of your server before adding your sitemap there.
Embed your BigCommerce site map to your robots.txt file
Last of all you’ll have to embed your sitemap location into your robots.txt file. To do it, you’ll have to edit your file by adding a directive with the URL of your site map. As a result, your robots.txt file will have this look:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow:
What to do in case BigCommerce site map contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt
Occasionally, there might be a case just as you get a trigger for your website in Search Console for "Site map includes URLs which are blocked by robots.txt". If you wanted to do so, this advice can be ignored. But in case you ’re new here, you certainly need to make sure and identify if everything’s going well with the work of your site map.
More often than not, blocked sitemap URLs are at most caused by programmers who improperly set up their robots.txt file. In each instance you’re disallowing, you are to double-check you get the picture of what you’re doing and what adjustments will be reflected on your sitemap. Alternatively, the warning will be displayed and the web crawlers won’t have an opportunity to crawl your BigCommerce website.
That’s why, before managing to deal with the "site map includes URLs which are blocked by robots.txt" issue, inspect the following things:
- Check for any Disallow rules in your robots.txt file of your BigCommerce. This file should be contained in your root directory, just like it is shown in this example: https://example.com/robots.txt.
- If your BigCommerce website recently migrated from HTTP to HTTPS, you\ll have to make sure that you’ve made a new property for the HTTPS version and as well that the robots.txt file is available via HTTPS.
- To find out what warnings or errors are being presented for your site, apply robots.txt Tester tool that is available in the Google Search Console.
- In some cases, your robots.txt may be cached. It signifies that you should grant Google some time to recrawl your BigCommerce site. You may even try to submit once more your site to Search Console if there are any issues that were addressed.
- You can even by hand ask Google to crawl your BigCommerce site. To make it happen, go to your Search Console, go to the “Crawl” option and then choose “Fetch as Google”. There you are free to add the URL path in your sitemap which Google was warning you about and choose “Fetch”. As soon as all’s reloaded, select the “Request Indexing” and then click “Crawl only this URL” within your site map.
Once any alterations have been performed to the robots.txt file, it will require somewhile for Google to crawl your BigCommerce site. And in case you are confident enough that all the incompatible Disallow rules are eliminated, then it’s only a matter of time for Google to do its job for your BigCommerce website.
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