SFCC XML Sitemaps
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1. What is a sitemap?
At a high level, an XML sitemap is a file that houses all the active URLs found on that site. Once created, you’ll be able to submit the URLs in an XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools – making an XML sitemap is an easy win and an SEO-must if you want to make sure your site is found by search engines like Google and Bing.
There are some great fundamentals to creating sitemaps but I’ll speak to those that are specific to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Although specific to WordPress, Yoast provides a pretty clean introduction to the basics of an XML sitemap; read more here.
When you are in the XML sitemaps portal for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you are greeted to the below,
In our walkthrough, I’m only going to focus on
- Files
- Settings
- Custom Sitemaps
- Job
However if you’d like to walk through Salesforce’s Sitemap documentation, you can find it here.
It’s important to note that the sitemap settings and files don’t replicate from Staging into Production. This is significant as in your SEO project plan or website migration, you may only be optimizing in Staging. However, the SFCC XML sitemap is one of those rare instances, you’ll need to move to optimizing in the Production environment, as well.
Additionally, you’ll need to configure the hostname aliases correctly to generate sitemaps in either environment.
Let’s get started.
2. Files
This portal is simply the output of your sitemap files. You can toggle between various hosts but it’s important to configure the hostname aliases to generate the XML sitemaps.
The cool thing about this portal is that you’re able to generate the files and download them so you can examine them in your text editor or your crawler.
I typically like downloading the XML sitemaps and QAing to ensure that they are set up correctly and optimally.
3. Settings
Once you click through to the Settings tab, you get greeted to various settings that will help generate and customize your sitemaps.
3.1 Includes & Updates
From here, you can create adjust sitemap settings for various page types, including,
- Product Pages
- Product Images
- Categories
- Content
- Folder
- Pipelines
- Custom Sitemaps
Additionally, you can select to send a page type to a separate Sitemap file or group altogether.
Separating the page types has proved to be very efficient on my end. When you’re QAing your sitemap, you’re able to better dissect and analyze by page type. That’s to say, if there’s an issue with your Product Sitemaps, you don’t have to crawl or analyze categories or content pages to find the issue.
You can also toggle the change frequency of each page type; the change frequency will allow you to tell search engines how often the pages change. Additionally, you’ll be able to denote the priority of each page type.
Keep in mind that both change frequency and priority have been demoted and are not regularly used by Google. However, I feel it’s still important to configure for other search engines.
3.2 Configuration & Alternate URLs
Scrolling down, you get to further configure the sitemaps.
Underneath the Configuration section, you can set sitemap link limits, with 50,000 Links being the recommended limit.
Additionally, you can select the size of the images you’d want to include on the XML, which may help search engines more efficiently download the sitemap.
Lastly, you can tell search engines if they should access products that are either available, in-stock, or no longer sold. Depending on the site, you may want to adjust which option you choose. Something to keep in mind, however, is if you have a product page that is out of stock and not orderable, but still being ranked to users, it may provide a negative user experience.
Alternate URLs allow you to include international URLs into the sitemaps. However please keep in mind that to do so, the site has to be configured with locales.
4. Custom Sitemaps
Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers you the ability to upload custom sitemaps.
This has proven useful when you’re trying to upload a more custom experience. A use-case example was when I had worked with an international client but we didn’t have the means to build hreflang tags, so we built hreflang sitemaps. The hreflang sitemaps were meant to help build a relationship across all international versions of a webpage.
The custom sitemaps can be “Included” via the Settings portal and will be accessible via the “Files” section.
5. Job
After you’re done configuring the various sitemap settings as well as uploading any custom sitemaps, you can now toggle on the “Job” that will generate the sitemaps.
On the left-hand side, you have the sitemaps’ “Status”; whether or not it has been enabled / pushed live.
On the right-hand side, you’re able to configure its “Schedule”. You can select the day it should start, how often it should be run as well as on which days.
See Salesforce Commerce Cloud documentation for configuring an XML Sitemap here.
