startShoppingBot Information
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Sitemaps
Use a sitemap to present the urls of your products to our indexing bots
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There is no limit on how many sitemaps you can use
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There is no limit on how many urls each sitemap contains
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Sitemaps should contain links to all of the products in your online shop
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Our indexing robots will decompress any XML files that have been compressed with gzip
If you have created an XML sitemap for your website add the following line to your robots.txt file for each sitemap:
Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com.au/sitemap.xml
Sitemap Optional Tags
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product:title (Must be used if using the description or image options)
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product:description
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product:image:url
These tags for the sitemap xml file are an optional extra you can use to help streamline the indexing of pages in your website.
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By including these optional tags for each url in the sitemap file it eliminates the need for the indexing bots to hit each page in your website to be included in the search engine database
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When sitemaps are re-processed your pages are updated directly from the sitemap files
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To determine if the page is still valid our indexing bots perform a head request instead of a get request
Sitemap Code
Your sitemap must have the following node structure:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com.au</loc>
<product:title>![CDATA[Website Page Title]]</product:title>
<product:description>![CDATA[Product Description]]</product:description>
<product:image:url>http://www.yourwebsite.com.au/images/product_image1.png</product:image:url>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com.au/products</loc>
<product:title>![CDATA[Website Page Title]]</product:title>
<product:description>![CDATA[Product Description]]</product:description>
<product:image:url>http://www.yourwebsite.com.au/images/product_image1.png</product:image:url>
</url>
</urlset>
Sitemap Index Files
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Sitemap index files contain one or more links to sitemaps
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There is no limit to how many urls to sitemaps each sitemap index file contains
Sitemap Index Code
Your sitemap index must have the following node structure:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com.au/sitemap1.xml</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com.au/sitemap2.xml</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>