Notify Search Engines About Your Sitemap

After successfully creating a sitemap for a storefront, you must submit the sitemap to main search engines manually.

Note: Although this topic deals specifically with Google, all search engines have a similar procedure.

Register with the Google Sitemaps program and submit your sitemap. This also lets you see some interesting statistics about your site, such as the most used keywords and any spidering problems.

Google checks your sitemap for updates regularly, so you don't need to submit your sitemap more than once.

Although you might produce new sitemaps on a regular schedule, Google only updates its links after requesting the sitemap. If you produce sitemaps more frequently than Google checks for updates, you can notify Google about sitemap updates by pinging their sitemap server.

To Register with the Google Sitemaps Program:

If you don't already have a search engine account, you need to create one. For Google, search on "Webmaster Tools". You can create your account on the Webmaster Tools page.
Log in to your search engine account.
On the Dashboard page, enter the URL for your site.
On the Overview page, click the Verify Your Site link.
Register your site with the search engine.

Note: Salesforce recommends placing the location of your sitemap_index.xml file in your robots.txt file.