CMS Auto Generated Sitemap Work Around?

[paul-bold]

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!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[paul-bold]

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!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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