All Shopify websites automatically get a sitemap.xml file that includes links to all sorts of posts published on the website. This file is used by all search engines to index your site so that it could appear in search results.
Submitting your site map to Google helps search engine to find and index pages on your website. Let’s see how you can find your sitemap and how you can submit it to popular search engines in order to make your site highly visible on search.
How to find your Shopify sitemap
All sitemap files are generated automatically. They can be found at the root directory of your shopify site’s domain. If you’re using Shopify Basic plan, then you’ve only got a sitemap for your store’s primary domain. And in case you’ve selected Shopify plan or higher, then there will also be sitemaps for each additional domain you’ve got.
How do I submit a site map to Google
Actually, there’s no acute need to submit your Shopify site map to Search Console manually as Google can find and explore your website and sitemap organically. But it only includes smaller or medium -sized sites. Below you’ll see what Google Search Console has to say about events when submitting your Shopify site map is possibly a way to go:
- Supposing your site is really big - the larger it is, the likelier Googlebot may miss several pages on it and within your site map. Especially it concerns big ecommerce websites. If your Shopify website is used as an online store, that’s your story - submit your sitemap in a manual way.
- If there’s a large archive of content pages, isolated pages, or not linked together pages on your Shopify site and sitemap.
- In case you have a new site that hasn’t got many (or even one) backlinks. As long as Googlebot uses links to discover website pages, it also uses links directed from other domains to find your website. And if other sites haven't begun to link to your site yet, it will take much longer for your sitemap to be detected. So in case you don’t want to lose traffic for your Shopify site, you’d better submit your site map to Search Console in a manual way.
- You have a great deal of media content like video, images, on your Shopify site or it is shown in Google News. All of these files, admittedly, will be seen by Google sometime, but your goal is to make your Shopify site and sitemap marked sooner.
To see how much of your website and sitemap has been indexed by Google, merely perform a “site: ” search. But you should remember: Google will demonstrate you an approximate number of results, and this number is not perfectly reliable. So it is preferable to submit your Shopify website and sitemap to Search Console by hand.
In case you assume that submitting your site map to Google Search Console works for you, then follow these easy steps given below to do it:
- Search out your sitemap. This can be done by executing the actions we’ve described previously.
- Open your Google Search Console account, and then locate your appropriate property. It is of importance that you double-check you discover the property for the correct domain you are going to submit your site map for. Remember that http:// and https:// are not the same, and example.com and www.example.com are not interchangeable too.
- Proceed to “Sitemap” section below “Index” leftward website navigation panel.
- Weed out old and outdated sitemaps if any were submitted. To find this possibility and outdated sitemap on your site, click three stacked dots at the right corner of the site page.
- Adjoin your sitemap URL downward a “Add a new sitemap” and again select “Submit”. Thereafter you’ll simply need to submit the end of the URL of your site map, not just the Shopify domain portion.
Soon Google Search Console will certify that your sitemap has been discovered. It may take a while before your site map gets crawled.
But there’s not just Search Console you might need to submit your Shopify site and sitemap to. And now let’s observe the ways you can submit your sitemap to Bing and Yahoo.
How do I submit Shopify sitemap to Bing and Yahoo search
In certain circumstances, you may find it necessary to submit your sitemap to Bing or Yahoo to make your Shopify site noticed by users of these search engines. Acknowledge the prompts:
- Find the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard, and after that log in utilizing your username and password.
- Locate the “Sitemap” widget on the main screen of your panel, and then access the Sitemap tool.
- Type the URL of your site map into the input field in the bottom-right corner, and click “Submit” option. Your sitemap’sURL will be submitted to Bing and right after that - added to your register of sitemaps atop the input box.
Bear in mind that if you wish your Shopify site to pop up in Yahoo, you’ll also need to submit your site map to Bing as Yahoo Search results issue from the Yahoo web crawler (Slurp) and Bing's crawler. And to manage how your site is shown in Yahoo Search you’ll have to apply meta tags and robots.txt with submitting the site map.
How do I add sitemap to robots.txt
A robots.txt file is a text that is placed within the root directory of your Shopify website. The robots.txt file is in order for tell search engines which exact areas of your site must be crawled/indexed, and the ones that shouldn’t. Likewise, it shows which search engines have permission to crawl your Shopify site and sitemap. And it’s essential to get this file on your website because it’s the first goal a search engine bot will look up before implementing any other actions with a site map.
Likewise robots.txt file does, a site map allows search engines to crawl through and then index the pages of your Shopify website collected in one place. You can create the robots.txt file that will comprise your site map by following these easy steps given below:
Find your Shopify sitemap URL
If you or the programmer you team with have already made your sitemap, then it’s probably can be found at http: //www.example.com/sitemap.xml. The “Example” here can be replaced by your Shopify domain name. You are welcome to confirm if it’s true by putting this URL in the browser field right where you will either notice your sitemap or the 404 page indicating that this particular location does not contain your site map.
You are also welcome to use the help of Google search operators. All you’re up to here is simply type site: example.com filetype: xml in the search bar.
If you can’t spot your sitemap, then seemingly it does not exist. In this case, generate the site map yourself or search for assistance from a skilled programmer.
Look for your robots.txt file
And likewise it was with your site map, you can make sure that your robots.txt is stored on your site by writing http: //www.example.com/robots.txt, and swap out the “example” by your domain. If it emerges that you don’t have this file, then you need to compile it and confirm that it was attached to the top-level directory of your server before attaching your sitemap there.
Attach your Shopify sitemap to your robots.txt file
Eventually you’ll have to attach your site map location to your robots.txt file. In order to do this, you’ll have to perform edits to your file by adjoining a directive containing the URL of your sitemap. In the issue, your robots.txt file will look like this:
Sitemap: http: //www.example.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow:
What to do if Shopify sitemap includes URLs which are blocked by robots.txt
Occasionally, there might be a case when you see a trigger warning for your website in the Search Console for "Sitemap includes URLs which are blocked by robots.txt". If you need to do so, this alarm can be avoided. But in case you haven’t got much experience, you definitely need to check and see if everything’s fine with the functioning of your site map.
In most cases, blocked sitemap URLs are commonly caused by developers who improperly configure their robots.txt files. Every time you’re disallowing, you have to check you understand what you’re doing and what alterations will be mirrored on your sitemap. In another way, the guidance will be demonstrated and the crawlers won’t have an opportunity to crawl your Shopify site.
That’s why, before trying to work out the "site map includes URLs that are blocked by robots.txt" issue, inspect the following things:
- Check for any Disallow orders in your robots.txt file of your Shopify. The robots.txt file should be contained within your root directory, as it is demonstrated in this example: https: //example.com/robots.txt.
- If your Shopify website recently shifted from HTTP to HTTPS, then check that you’ve built a new property for the HTTPS version and as well that the robots.txt is available via HTTPS.
- To find out what warnings or mistakes are being generated for your site, put to use robots.txt Tester that is available in the Search Console.
- Frequently, your robots.txt can be cached. It signifies that you must grant Google certain time to recrawl your Shopify website. There’s even a chance to try to submit once more your website to Search Console in case there are some more problems that were forwarded.
- You can try to in a manual way ask Google to re-crawl your Shopify website. For this to happen, proceed to your Search Console account, open the “Crawl” area and then find “Fetch as Google”. There you are free to add the URL path in your sitemap which Google was informing you about and choose “Fetch”. Just as all’s reloaded, select the “Request Indexing” and choose “Crawl only this URL” in your sitemap.
Once any amendments have been implemented into your robots.txt file, it will require a while for Google to re-crawl your Shopify site. And in case you are confident enough that all the conflicting Disallow rules were removed, then it’s only an inquiry of time for Google to make its job on your Shopify page.
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