Set Sitemap Attributes

Salesforce B2C Commerce generates a sitemap that is compatible with the Sitemap Protocol 0.9 from Sitemaps.Org.

There are two ways to set sitemap attributes: you can import them through a feed or add them manually in Business Manager. This page describes how to set them manually in the sitemap functionality. If the new sitemap feature is enabled on your instance, you can configure sitemap in the Sitemaps module.

Note: The recommended method of creating sitemap attributes is through a feed.

For a B2C Commerce page to be included in the sitemap, you must set these attributes: Included, Change Frequency, and Priority.

Sitemap attribute values can be set manually.

To set:
  • Product-specific values: select site > Merchant Tools > Products and Catalogs > Products > product . Select the General tab and scroll down to the Sitemap Attributes section.
  • Content-specific values: select site > Merchant Tools > Content > Content Assets > content asset . Select the General tab and scroll down to the Sitemap Attributes section.
  • Category values: select site > Merchant Tools > Products and Catalogs > Catalogs > catalog > category . Select the Category Attributes tab and scroll down to the Sitemap Attributes section.
  • Default values: select site > Merchant Tools > SEO > Sitemaps. Set the default value in the job that generates the site map.
  • Folder-specific values: select site > Merchant Tools > Content > Libraries > library > folder . Select the General tab and scroll down to the Sitemap Attributes section.
  • Pipeline-specific values: select site > Merchant Tools > SEO > Sitemaps - Pipelines. Scroll down to the Pipeline section.
    Note: All pipelines default to being excluded from the Sitemaps.

Change Frequency Attribute

The change frequency of a page indicates to search engines how frequently the page might change. However, this does not dictate how often the search engine crawls the page. You can set the Change Frequency attribute to one of the following values:

  • always: Use this value to describe documents that change each time they are accessed.
  • hourly
  • daily
  • weekly
  • monthly
  • yearly
  • never: Use this value to describe archived URLs.
Note: If you are using content slots, make sure that the frequency matches that of the scheduled changes to content.

The order of precedence for Change Frequency and Priority values are:

  1. The page-specific attributes of the item.
  2. Then the classification category of the product.
  3. Then the primary category of the product.
  4. If no category attributes are found, the default settings configured in the catalog feed are used.

Priority Attribute

You can set the Priority value from 0.0 to 1.0 for one digit past the decimal (for example, 0.1, 0.2). This is used by search engines to determine which pages to crawl first. While this has no effect on the rank of your page in search results, it does ensure that if a page is important, that it's more likely to be present in the search index. If no value is specified, then the default priority of the page is assumed to be .5 by the search engine. Pages with higher values are assumed to be more important and pages with lower values are assumed to be less important.

Included Attribute

The Included attribute is set to NONE by default.
  • If all objects are set to NONE, the system default has Content excluded and Folder URLs included, and require the sitemap-included-flag set to false at the Content object to be included or Folder object to be excluded.
  • If all objects are set to NONE, the system default has Product URLs not included.
  • If all objects are set to NONE, the system default has Catalog URLs included.

You can set the Included attribute to one of the following values:

  • NONE: Undefined by the item, so a fallback occurs using the assigned catalog category, via the order of precedence described below.
  • 1 (YES): The item is always included in the sitemap, no matter what setting a parent category has.
  • 0 (NO): The item is always excluded from the sitemap. Salesforce recommends setting content snippets, such as footers and headers, to NO.

The order of precedence for Included values is as follows:

  1. If the classification category exists, retrieve a value from this category or one of the parent categories up to the root category. If the classification category is a root category, the item is included.
  2. Then, if the product has a primary category in the current storefront catalog, retrieve a value from this category or one of the parent categories up to the root category
  3. Else, the item is excluded.