Sitemaps

Sitemaps are XML files that provide search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN, with information about a web site so crawler can index it more efficiently. Sitemaps contain a list of all the URLs available for indexing and can provide the search engine with additional information, such as when a page was last updated, frequency of updates, and the relevance of a page. Search engines use this information to construct links to your site and control the ranking of links within its search results.

The main advantages of using sitemaps are as follows:

Improved crawler coverage of your site: With sitemaps, you can expose dynamic content that's not referenced by the static content of the site and can't be found by the standard crawling process.
Improved search results: Sitemaps keep your content fresh in search indexes. You can avoid out-of-date indexed content in search results by notifying the search engine of the frequency of changes to any given page, so the search engine knows when it needs to reindex the page.
Improved understanding of your site: You can examine the reports made available by Google about the visibility of your pages, statistics on searches resulting in traffic to your site, and how the crawler indexes the different pages in the site.

Google

Google is an example of a search engine and SiteGenesis is an example of a site. Because Google has almost half the market share of all search engines, a concentrated effort to optimize the traffic driven from Google makes good business sense. However, because most search engines use the sitemap.org protocol to define their sitemaps, the sitemaps that you generate for Google can also be registered and used with other search engines, such as Yahoo or MSN.

See Sitemap Topology.

Configuring Sitemaps in Salesforce B2C Commerce

B2C Commerce generates a sitemap that's compatible with the Sitemap Protocol 0.9 from Sitemaps.Org. This is the standard sitemap definition for Google.

To use sitemaps on B2C Commerce:

Configure sitemap attributes in the respective data, either through a feed or manually in Business Manager.
Generate sitemaps in Business Manager. See Generating Sitemaps.
Create an account with the search engine of choice and verify site ownership. See Notifying Search Engines About Your Sitemap.

Home Page Link in Sitemap

The B2C Commerce storefront-generated map contains a link to the homepage of your store in this format:

http://<alias>/on/demandware/Sites-<Sitename>-Site/default/Home-Show.

However, if you configure a domain alias for your site which resolves to your home page, using a rule similar to:

"www.mysite.com" : [
{"pipeline":"Home-Show"} 
],

Then the generated sitemap contains a link similar to:

http://www.mysite.com/

Note: Configure sitemap settings individually for each instance type. You can't replicate sitemap site preferences between Staging and Production or Development. You must create the settings and job to generate the sitemap on each instance

Multiple Sites

If you have multiple sites, you might need multiple sitemaps. If your sites share the same product catalog, even if they have different locales, they do not need separate sitemaps.

However, if your sites don't share the same product catalog, they need different sitemaps. These sitemaps must be registered and generated separately.