SEO Step 2: Speed Up Google Crawling and Indexing - Upload Sitemap
主动提交站点地图信息，就是为了让谷歌可以更快速以及更完整地完成第一步，也就是抓取你的网站以及相关网页。
In the previous step, we connected our website to GSC. Now let's use GSC for our first实质性 SEO action!
Sitemap and Google Search Principles (Why)
From Google Official
Submitting your sitemap information allows Google to complete the first step more quickly and completely - crawling your website and related pages.
Note! As mentioned in the previous article: This step is NOT mandatory! Even if you don't submit a sitemap, your website and pages will still be crawled normally!
What is a Sitemap and What Does It Look Like (What)
A Sitemap is like an automatically syncing directory list. You hand a directory directly to Google, so Google can quickly crawl all your pages at once through this directory list.
Whether you use Shopify or WordPress, Sitemaps are automatically generated. More specifically, they're generated as XML files. You can view them directly in your address bar. Most address formats are:
www.abc.com/sitemap.xmlwww.abc.com/wp-sitemap.xml
How to Submit Your Sitemap (How)
Since Sitemaps are automatically generated, we don't need to do much with the Sitemap itself (though some plugins allow advanced Sitemap settings, for small individual sellers with small websites, I don't think it's necessary.)
So, all we need to do is upload the Sitemap to GSC.
Step 1: Enter GSC Panel, Click Sitemap
Step 2: Enter Sitemap Address and Submit
Step 3: Done, so easy!
FAQ
Q: My website is multilingual, do I need to submit multiple sitemaps?
A: Only in one case do you need to submit multiple:
- Your US site
www.abc.com - Your UK site
www.abc.co.uk
In this case, you have two separate websites, so both need to be submitted.
In other cases, you don't need to submit additional ones - just submit the main sitemap file.
Q: What are robots.txt and hreflang tag?
A: Don't worry, 99% of Shopify individual sellers can ignore these.
Robots.txt is used to tell Google's search engine advanced crawling rules, like what not to crawl or index. Don't touch it, don't touch it, don't touch it!
hreflang tag is used for international SEO, telling Google's search engine which page to show to users in which region. You wouldn't want a Spanish user to see an Italian page, right? Shopify adds this automatically.
Q: Do I need to manually update my Sitemap?
A: No.
