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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.

Feeds

To create your Google Site Map, click on the "+" icon.

Feeds

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."

Add Feed

Once you select from the drop down menu, an expanded window will appear with more choices.

Add Feed

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:

Sitemap:

Sample Sitemap

Notify Google of an updated sitemap & Notify Bing of an updated sitemap –

When checked Miva will send the updated sitemap to Google or Bing.

Notify Google

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

Available

Customer Account Balance

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

Include Pages

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

Last Modified

Change Frequency –

Depends on when you'd like to set this up for, we chose "Weekly."

Change Frequency

Viewing/Downloading Your Sitemap:

After you generate your sitemap you can edit the settings and a link will be available to “View Sitemap.”

Download Sitemap

This link only shows up after the sitemap has been generated.

Looking for Developer Docs?

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Head to the Developer Section

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