How To Guides
How to Create a Google Sitemap Through Feeds
In Miva 9.6 you can now create your own Google Sitemap using a new feature called "Feeds."
What is a Sitemap:
A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.
Why is a Sitemap Important:
Your sitemap can provide valuable metadata associated with the pages you list in that sitemap: Metadata is information about a webpage, such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other URLs in the site. If your site’s pages are properly linked, our web crawlers can usually discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of your site
How to create your Google Sitemap:
You'll find it under the main menu. Click "Menu," then scroll down to "Marketing," and you'll see the "Feeds" tab shown below, click on it.
To create your Google Site Map, click on the "+" icon.
An "Add Feed" window will pop up. Add a name for your site map. In this example, we're using "google_sitemap" for the code and "Google Sitemap" for the name. When you come to the drop down menu called "Feed Module" select "Standard Sitemap Protocol."
Once you select from the drop down menu, an expanded window will appear with more choices.
Update robots.txt when sitemap is created –
This adds the following code to your robots.txt file which tells google spiders where your sitemap is located:
Here's a sample of what your sitemap will look like:
Notify Google of an updated sitemap & Notify Bing of an updated sitemap –
When checked Miva will send the updated sitemap to Google or Bing.
Products –
Available: All Available Products ("Available" should be the option chosen if you have Availability Groups.)
Products URI Priority: 0.5
Categories –
Active: All Active Categories
Categories URI Priority: 0.5
Include pages in the sitemap –
Allows all Miva pages to be included in the sitemap. To exclude a page you can assign the sitemap_exclude item to any page
By default the following pages are excluded:
| CADE | Customer Address: Edit |
| CADA | Customer Address: Add |
| CABK | Customer Address Book |
| ACLN | Customer Account |
| ORDS | Order Status |
| ORDH | Order History List |
| OPAY | Checkout: Payment Information |
| OSEL | Checkout: Shipping/Payment Selection |
| OUSM | Checkout: Upsell Product (Multiple) |
| OUS1 | Checkout: Upsell Product (Single) |
| UATR | Upsell: Missing Product Attributes (Single) |
| UATM | Upsell: Missing Product Attributes (Multiple) |
| RGFT | Redeem Gift Certificate |
| ABAL | Customer Account Balance |
| ACED | Customer Edit |
| CEML | Change Email Address |
| CPWD | Change Password |
| PROD | Product Display |
| CTGY | Category Display |
Priority to be output with each URL. More information on Priority can be found here:
Output Non-Canonical URIs –
Outputs non-canonical URIs for a product. Typically you Only include canonical URLs. A common mistake is to include URLs of duplicate pages. This increases the load on your server without improving indexing
Output Archived URIs –
Outputs URIs whch have been 301 redirected for a product
Last Modified –
Choose either Date or Date & TIme
Change Frequency –
Depends on when you'd like to set this up for, we chose "Weekly."
Viewing/Downloading Your Sitemap:
After you generate your sitemap you can edit the settings and a link will be available to “View Sitemap.”
This link only shows up after the sitemap has been generated.