CMS Auto Generated Sitemap Work Around?
-
Hey Moz Community,
The Shopify ecommerce platform auto generates xml sitemaps and robots.txt for you.
Frustratingly there is no way to augment either of these. If I noindex on a page it will still show up in the site map... Causing inconstancy with the sitemap submitted to GWT.
In theory if put the MY version of the sitemap on site and point GWT to MY version.. Would this solve the inconstancy ? Or would Googlebot go in and still crawl the default /sitemap.xml anyway?
Any suggestions and insight is greatly appreciated!
-
Hi Dylan,
I haven't worked much with the technical side of Shopify, so wasn't aware of this. Very prohibitive though.
I hope you can get this sorted OK.
-Andy
-
Hey Andy,
I haven't directly asked the powers that be at Shopify to turn it off.. However our developer here gave me a pretty technical explanation that essentially comes down to because Shopify runs on rails and the way it handles hitting the server changing something would change it for everyone.
Thanks for pointing out the robots file referencing the old sitemap by the way. Close one!
-
Hi Dylan,
When you upload a sitemap, you get the option to state which one, and the location. If you were to upload your own and then point to it, this should be fine. Just remember to either remove the auto-generated one and never add it.
Are you able to add to the robots file? If so, you can point to your site map in there too. However, if this is already in, don't add your own otherwise Google will see two and inconsistencies will occur.
Are they unwilling to turn this off for you?
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Query on Sitemap xml Root Path
Is it compulsory to have sitemap.xml at this path - abcd.com/sitemap.xml? My sitename is abcd.com. Now is it compulsory to have sitemap.xml at this path - abcd.com/sitemap.xml only? a) If i take cnd services where path can be like xyz.com/sitemap.xml and then this sitemap i can submit in robot file so it is fine? b) What will happen here in webmaster tool as in webmaster tool when we submit sitemap by default it gives us domain name like abcd.com and we have to just add /sitemap.xml
Technical SEO | | Johny123450 -
Have I constructed my robots.txt file correctly for sitemap autodiscovery?
Hi, Here is my sitemap: User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.bedsite.co.uk/sitemaps/sitemap.xml Directories Disallow: /sendfriend/
Technical SEO | | Bedsite
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /media/catalog/product/cache/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /categories/
Disallow: /blog/index.php/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/result/index/
Disallow: /links.html I'm using Magento and want to make sure I have constructed my robots.txt file correctly with the sitemap autodiscovery? thanks,0 -
Children in this Sitemap index Warnings
Hi, I have just submitted a sitmap for one website. But I am getting this warning: Number of children in this Sitemap index 3
Technical SEO | | knockmyheart
Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt.Sitemap: www.zemtube.com/videoscategory-sitemap.xmlValue: http://www.zemtube.com/videoscategory/exclusive/www.zemtube.com/videoscategory-sitemap.xmlValue: http://www.zemtube.com/videoscategory/featured/www.zemtube.com/videoscategory-sitemap.xmlValue: http://www.zemtube.com/videoscategory/other/It is a wordpress website and the robots.txt file is:# Exclude Files From All Robots: User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /tag/ End robots.txt file#I have also tried adding this to the robots.txtSitemap: http://www.zemtube.com/sitemap_index.xmlWebmaster-Tools-Sitemaps-httpwww.zemtube.com_.pdf0 -
Duplicate Title Tag issue due to Shopify CMS
Hi guys, I'm a novice really when it comes to SEO, yet have taken it in house for the next year or so, firstly because I have had my fingers burnt twice...and secondly, to allow me to recoup some of the loss from my prior campaigns. One thing I have noticed on my site (which uses a Shopify E-commerce CMS), is that Shopify duplicates a url for each my products. An example of this is http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/collections/designer-radiators-heating/products/reina-aliano
Technical SEO | | philscott2006
http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/products/reina-aliano Both products provide exactly the same information, yet appear in different ways subject to how the customer finds them. I contacted Shopify to find a fix to this issue when I noticed a high amount of Duplicate Title Tags in my SEO crawl. Their response was as follows. Using a rel canonical link will help prevent duplicate content issues with search engines. All you need to do is add this line of code: **<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />** ** before the tag in the theme.liquid file. It’s that simple :)** The theme liquid file basically generates the outer template for the whole site, and is only compromised when over-ruled. This all seems a little too easy for me, so I am hoping whether someone can elaborate as to whether this will work or not, as I'm not entirely sold on their response. I was always under the impression with canonical tags, that they should be added to the header section of the duplicate page in question, which refers back to the original page. The code I have been told to add above implies that the canonical tag would be added to every page in my site so the Google robot would have a hard time in finding anything at all of relevance Thanks in advance for any assistance with this. Kind Regards Phil Scott Vida Homes0 -
How can I best find out which URLs from large sitemaps aren't indexed?
I have about a dozen sitemaps with a total of just over 300,000 urls in them. These have been carefully created to only select the content that I feel is above a certain threshold. However, Google says they have only indexed 230,000 of these urls. Now I'm wondering, how can I best go about working out which URLs they haven't indexed? No errors are showing in WMT related to these pages. I can obviously manually start hitting it, but surely there's a better way?
Technical SEO | | rango0 -
Sitemap coming up in Google's index?
I apologize if this question's answer is glaringly obvious, but I was using Google to view all the pages it has indexed of our site--by searching for our company and then clicking the link that says to display more results for the site. On page three, it has the sitemap indexed as if it wee just another page of our site. <cite>www.stadriemblems.com/sitemap.xml</cite> Is this supposed to happen?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Google WMT shows sitemap.xml highest ranked for one main keyword
Hello, I am seeing my sitemap.xml show up in Google webmaster tools at the top for one of the main keywords for my site. This is in the Your Site on the Web - Keywords section. The URLs of my site contain this keyword, which is why I figure it showed up. I'm curious if this should be a concern to me? I find it odd that the sitemap would show up in this way. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nux0 -
What's the best way to switch over to a new site with a different CMS?
Is it better to 301 or to closely duplicate each page URL when switching over to a new website from an established site with good ranking and a different CMS ( Drupal switching to Wordpress)?
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve0