What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a list of pages on your website in hierarchical order.

It plays the role of "roadmap" for search engines to discover and identify the content of your website. The sitemap is used in SEO optimization as a means to promote your web resource. The sitemap contains all URLs related to the resource, prioritizes pages for indexing, and indicates the date of the last modification of the page.

Best Practices and How to Utilize the Sitemap

When building the sitemap, it is important to provide good link names. This articles shows the process

The process of crawling in your website begins with search engines finding and opening your domain’s robots.txt file. This provides the search engines an allowance to visit the links on your website using automated bots.

There is no need to configure the sitemap on any coreFORCE website as coreFORCE automates this process. You can see the links to it by going to your domain's robots.txt file. The robots.txt file on coreFORCE website can be found adding the robots.txt in the end of your domain, such as  [https://demostore.coreware.com/robots.txt](https://demostore.coreware.com/robots.txt).

Example of a robots.txt file



It is worth mentioning that most retail sites have at least two sitemaps in coreFORCE.  The first one is all the pages and taxonomy results (category groups, categories, manufacturers, tags) + the first 10,000 products.  All the remaining product links will be put into sitemap1, 2, 3 etc. in sets of 20,000 products each. That keeps each sitemap file from getting too big. 

How do I edit my sitemap?

It is not possible or necessary to modify the XML of the sitemap, since it is autogenerated every time it is requested.  If you need to remove an out of date page from the sitemap, go to Website > Pages > Pages and mark that page as "inactive" or "internal use only"



If there is a page that needs to be active but you do not want it to be found by a search engine, you can exclude it by choosing the option "exclude from sitemap" field in page maintenance.

Updated on: 06/26/2024