Sitemap include all site links or just ones we want indexed?

[Whebb]

Got a quick sitemap question. We have a clients site built in opencart and are getting ready to submit the sitmap. The default sitemap setting generates urls right off of the root. For example site.com/product. These urls are also accessible through the site itself. We prefer to give the site some depth and have structured the products so the urls are site.com/category/product. All of the product pages have canonicals including the category so we should not have to worry about duplicate content on the /product page vs the /category/product page. My question is both types of product pages are included in the sitemap at the moment. Since we don't want google to index the /product urls should we leave them off of the sitemap even though they are readily accessible from the frontend(though not linked)? Or just leave them and let the canonical tag be used in directing google as to which urls to index. Thanks in advance.

[Ray-pp]

Hi JStrong,

Great question to be asking and an important topic to be doing your due diligence on, especially when dealing with an eCommerce related website.

Google uses a sitemap as a guideline for crawling your site. So, just because you put a URL in your sitemap, doesn't mean that they URL will actually be indexed. You can see those stats in your Google Webmaster Tools account, under the Sitemap area. It will display how many URLs are in the sitemap and how many out of those URLs are indexed.

If you do not want certain pages to be indexed by Google, then you would need to adjust your robots.txt file to give Google those instructions.

As long as you have the correct Canonical configurations, you should avoid any duplicate content issues from the URLs you've described above.

Good luck!

[Whebb]

Hey Raymond,

Thanks for the response, feel like I'm over thinking this a bit, as usually we just leave our opencart setups as is, other then a few minor tweaks. Lately I've really been scrutinizing opencart's SEO setup and how to improve it, since it seems there are a lot of gaps in he way it handles this.

I thought the robots.txt would have been a good way to block the pages, but the issue is I would need to block every single product page as opencart automatically creates a page for every product that is site.com/product and since we are adding lots of products there should be a better way to handle this.  After I posted I came across this tidbit from a 6 year old google webmaster central blog post. Basically it states that 'While we can't guarantee that our algorithms will display that particular URL in search results, it's still helpful for you to indicate your preference by including that URL in your Sitemap. '. I think going this route along with the canonical should do the trick.

[Ray-pp]

Hi again JS,

I think it's great that you continue to evaluate your platform from all perspectives and evaluate its strengths/weaknesses. Many times, a platform can do a lot of the basics well, but fall short on the details that differentiate us from our competition. For example, opencart may do the basic SEO requirements well, but not include ecommerce microdata (schema.org) which have a high impact on our search listings.

You can do a lot of harm/good with the robots.txt file - like deindex entire website (probably not a good thing) or block certain directories (your /product issue). I would gain some deeper knowledge about what you can do with the robots.txt file and how you need it to perform for your business.