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• Miva 10 Sitemaps Create a Standard Sitemap Protocol Feed

Create a Standard Sitemap Protocol Feed

A Standard Sitemap Protocol Feed is another way of saying an XML Sitemap Feed. Once this feed is created it will automatically update your XML Sitemap.

To create the feed, click the Marketing header on the left side of the page, then click the Feeds tab. Once there, click the Add Feed button.

In the box that opens you will fill in the information below.

Code: The code uniquely identifies the feed in your store database.

Name: The name is used for display purposes in the Miva admin.

Feed Module: Click the dropdown and select Standard Sitemap Protocol.

Suffix: Generally speaking, you only need to use this field if you have multiple stores on the same domain. Your XML sitemap file will always be called “sitemap.xml.” If you have two stores on the same domain, the second sitemap file that you create will overwrite the first. To avoid this issue, you can add a suffix to your sitemap.xml file. For example, if you used the suffix “store1” then your sitemap field for that store would be named “sitemapstore1.xml.

Upate robots.txt when sitemap is created: A robots.txt file lives on the web server and gives instructions to scripts or programs that visit your website. If you check this box, a robots.txt file is created, if there isn’t one, and every time your sitemap file gets updated, the path to the file will be updated in the robots.txt file.

Notify Google of an updated sitemap: If you check this box, the Miva admin will automatically contact Google and send them the location of your XML sitemap file, every time the file is updated.

Notify Bing of an updated sitemap: If you check this box, the Miva admin will automatically contact Bing and send them the location of your XML sitemap file, every time the file is updated.

Products: The drop down provides you with three choices for which products will be listed in the XML sitemap file.

• None: The XML sitemap file will not list any of your products.
• Active: The XML sitemap file will contain all the products in your store, even if they are in Availability Groups.
• Available: The XML sitemap file will contain all the products in your store, unless they are in an Availability Group.

Product URI Priority: You can give the webpages listed in your XML sitemap a priority. The lowest priority is 0, while 1 is the highest. In theory, if you gave your product pages high priority, and your category pages low priority, your product pages might show up earlier in the results list from a search engine. However, search engines use several factors to create the results list, so these priority numbers do not have much effect.

Exclude Free Products: If this box is clicked, free products in your store will not be included in the XML sitemap feed.

Categories: Behaves just like the Products drop down listed above.

Categories URI Priority: Works the same as the Product URI Priority noted above.

Include pages in the sitemap: If this box is clicked, the XML sitemap feed will include any page where the sitemap_exclude item is not assigned. The purpose of this checkbox, and the sitemap_exclude item, is to give you the ability to have search engines index pages other than your category and product pages, if you feel that those pages have content that should be indexed. For example, you could check this box if you feel your ABUS page should be indexed (by default, the ABUS page does not have the sitemap_exclude item assigned.

Page URI Priority: Behaves just like the Products drop down listed above.

Non-Canonical URI Priority: Behaves just like the Products drop down listed above.

Output Non-Canonical URIs/Output Archived URIs: If these boxes are checked, your non-canonical URIs and archived URIs will be included in the XML sitemap.

Last Modified: The Last Modified field puts a “lastmod” tag in your XML sitemap. The lastmod date is, theoretically, the date the product/category page was modified. In reality, however, it will always be the date that the SML sitemap file was updated.

• None: Does not add a lastmod tag to the XML sitemap file.
• Date: Puts only the date in the lastmod tag.
• Date & Time: Puts the date and time in the lastmod tag.

Change Frequency: The Change Frequency field adds a changefreq tag to your XML sitemap file. Although it does not have much effect, the purpose is to give search engines some idea of how often your web pages change. In theory, this could influence how often you store pages are reindexed by a search engine. If you choose “Do Not Send” in the dropdown, your XML sitemap file will not have a changefreq tag in it.